


Love in the Time of Salmon

by JackTheBard



Series: Clod Commissions [3]
Category: Splatoon
Genre: F/M, Suicide mention
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:55:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 71,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21879979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackTheBard/pseuds/JackTheBard
Summary: Part 2 of the Clod Commissions series. Picking up where "Bad Squiddos" left off, this follows the story of the oddball Dason and the bubbly Valentina, as well as telling the story of Dason's sordid past and how he healed from what he had done.
Series: Clod Commissions [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1370509
Kudos: 7





	1. Chapter 1

After Valentina spoke, Claire and Starkey stared at each other for a moment before looking back at their teammates.

"Your story?" Claire asked, "What do you mean by that?"

"Well," Valentina said with a nervous shrug as she stared down at her pizza. While pizza was, in fact, incredibly interesting, it was not nearly as interesting, foreboding, or even as confounding as the question that Claire had asked.

Unable to really continue, Valentina looked over at Dason and asked, "Do you think... you could?"

Dason let out a low growl, and Valentina spoke up again in protest. "You don't have to if you don't want to!" she said, "I can find another way to explain it if you don't."

"No," Dason said. "It's fine."

Valentina took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "We're... not friends."

Dason gave a derisive growl at that, and Valentina threw her hands up in exasperation. "Come on! You're the one that told me not to tell anybody!"

Dason cut straight to the chase and said, "Valentina is my sister."

Silence hung in the air for a moment as Claire and Starkey took that information and pondered how to process it. Apparently, Starkey processed it a little faster.

"Why did you hide it?"

"I asked her to," Dason said before Valentina could cut in. He reached out for one of the boxes of pizza and removed a slice, a bite disappearing from it even as he pulled it away from its brethren. "I had my reasons."

"We've been living apart for a little while, now," Valentina added.

She spoke as Dason continued to eat. "It all started when mom got a job at the Turf War Authority. She got in big with Squidforce, and there was a lot of stuff that came with it. I was thirteen, Dason was fourteen."

Well that answered another question: Dason was the older of the pair. That was a mystery that didn't really need solving, but god damn if they didn't just Sherlock that shit out. Dason swallowed and picked up the slack in the conversation. "Kamila changed after that. She used to be a great mom, you know? Really encouraging, always looked after us, and we had a really good life.

"But over time," Dason said, and even Claire could see that there was uncertainty behind his mask, and that it was quickly turning into anger, "She got to be really strict, acting more like an administrator than a mother. Vale and I had started engaging in turf wars, and we were expected to be on our best behavior because anything bad that we did would reflect back on her."

Valentina jumped in to save Dason from his own building ire. "Our dad, Ratchet, approached her about it, and she wouldn't stop being the businesswoman. He left, so in a sense we were all alone."

She reached out and Dason gave her hand a reassuring squeeze as if to say that he was alright. He wasn't going to completely lose it, and he'd regained his composure. Even so, he took a long breath to steady himself and let Valentina's hand go. "It was just the two of us after that, since Kamila was barely here anymore. And whenever she was, she wasn't the mother that raised us. Somebody had to look out for my baby sister, and I figured that somebody just had to be me."

Without skipping a beat, Valentina's hand lashed out to drub Dason in the shoulder. For his part, Dason didn't even move save to look over at her with what one could only assume was a shit-eating grin under his mask. "I'm not a baby! just because you're fourteen months older than me doesn't mean you get to lord that over me forever!"

"You're a wee little baby," Dason teased.

"And you're fucking old!" Valentina hollered right back before slugging him in the shoulder again. This time, Dason actually did reach up to rub where she had punched him.

Claire looked over to see how Starkey was taking this. She didn't really know how siblings were supposed to act around one another. She was an only child. But there was a light in his eyes that belied the fact that he and his younger brother had probably had conversations or arguments that proceeded very similarly.

She looked back at her teammates to see that things had de-escalated to the point where Valentina was just flipping Dason off, and moving her hand around to prevent him from swatting it away. For now, it appeared that they were evenly matched.

"So we focused on Turf War," Valentina said, picking up on the previous conversation as if the sibling bickering interlude had never happened. "Dason got really good at it, I got pretty alright, and we did well for ourselves for a time. Yeah, mom paid for the house, but we covered pretty much everything else with our winnings from Turf War."

Her gaze shifted over to Dason, and Claire was surprised to see him scowling down at the table. "It wasn't all turf war money, though."

Claire tilted her head at the thought, trying to comprehend. Starkey spoke in a calm, level tone where he asked only: "How bad was it?"

"Worse than it should have been," Dason replied, "But not as bad as you think. It started with this guy named Koi."

***

Dason finished wiping the sweat from his brow after a match on Blackbelly Skatepark and let out a long breath of relief. He knew that the coin would be transferring to his account for the match right now, and that would probably be enough so he could take Vale out to a nice dinner tonight.

He'd been doing this for almost six years (he had just turned twenty), and he'd gotten pretty good at it. His Nozzlenose wasn't really that good for inking turf, but he'd gotten really used to his role as a hunter-splatter type. Vale was more of the inking type out of the two of them.

"Yo, dude," a voice said from behind him. Dason turned around to see an inkling with almost a cocky swagger to his walk and definitely one in his voice, "You were pretty solid out there. Want to squad up?"

Dason recognized him. They'd been on the same team for the last two matches, and he had held himself pretty well. Hell, he'd started working alongside Dason to keep the enemy suppressed, and that allowed the other two members of their team to ink more than enough turf to ensure the victory.

"I'm actually calling it quits for the day," Dason said as he straightened up and slung the gear case over his shoulder. "I have to get home to my little sister."

Then again, he wouldn't confess that his little sister was eighteen and could look after herself just fine for another couple of hours, but he wanted to be at the deli down the way before the dinner rush started.

"Think you could spare enough time for a cup of coffee, then?" the other inkling said as he jerked a thumb over towards the little cafe down the way.

Dason did the mental calculations. Approximately a half an hour for a cup of coffee and a bit of conversation, plus the forty-five minutes to get home and collect Valentina.

It was three o'clock now. He could afford the delay, especially since this guy seemed like he was pretty good at the game, and it would definitely pay to have someone at least a little competent watching his back.

"I can do that," Dason agreed as he made his way towards the exit of the lounge. "Dason, by the way," he said. He shifted his case from one hand to the other so he could extend the right towards his partner.

"Koi," the other inkling said as they traded grips. Koi's hands were strong, tough, and had callus on the tips of the fingers and along the edges of the palm. Dason didn't really know what kind of exercise could build up calluses like that, but there they were.

They sat down with their orders and chatted, and Dason quickly found himself enjoying Koi's company. He had a great sense of humor, knew how to tell a story, and made Dason feel very at ease.

However, when Dason's phone beeped with a message from Valentina, he finished his coffee and stood up hastily. "Sorry. My sister. I told her I'd treat her to dinner tonight."

"No, man, you're okay," Koi said, and Dason finally noticed that his tone of voice seemed to be a little cavalier more than anything else. "Want to trade numbers, though? Just so we can squad together next time?"

"Yeah, I'd be up for that," Dason agreed, and they bumped their phones together to exchange contact information.

Dason took the train and bus home to Valentina, and in a matter of minutes, they were sitting at a table in the deli with a card reading "69" (much to Valentina's amusement) sitting on the table. "So," Valentina asked, steepling her fingers in front of her and leaning her chin against them. "How was the day?"

"Most wins, but a few losses," Dason said, "No ranked today, though."

"You know that we could make a lot more there than we could by doing normal turf war," Valentina said. They'd had this conversation before, and it always went the same way.

"And deal with the salty tryhards that want to be pros so badly? No thanks," Dason said with a frown.

"Listen," Valentina said as she raised her hands in a placating gesture, "With the rank that we have right now, a week of playing ranked could net us enough money to pay for a decent apartment's rent. No more scraping and saving. Just play, and go."

"That's assuming we win," Dason replied as he finished stirring his matzoh ball soup and waggled the spoon at her. "If we don't, it's going to cut into our earnings big time."

"Come on," Valentina whined.

"I'm not coming on," Dason said with a twinge of sour to his voice.

"Fine," Valentina said as she folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. Their meal would be coming out soon, and neither of them wanted to make a scene at the table.

Dason was quiet for a second, blowing on the soup and taking a mouthful before he spoke again. "On the upside, I think I've found a good tag-team partner," he told her.

"Really?" Valentina said, not without incredulity.

"He seems like a pretty cool guy, and he's not completely incompetent. That's more than enough to make someone good in my book," Dason said.

"Well, if it means more wins for you, I'm all for it," Valentina said. There were no illusions between the two of them regarding who was the more skilled of the pair. Not to say that Valentina sucked, but Dason paid more attention to his fundamentals while Valentina had a little more flair.

Having flair got you splatted, more often than not.

"Still," Dason said with a shrug. "He seems like he's fun, so it'll mean that we'll have fun. I've already played a couple of matches with him, and he does Hunter-Splatter too so with two of us, we'll be able to keep the enemy team pinned."

"Sounds good," Valentina said as their meals were brought out to them. Dason had ordered a reasonable sandwich: rare roast beef and swiss on rye with horseradish mustard and a stack of chips.

Valentina, on the other hand, had ordered something that didn't quite fit the description of "sandwich" and came a lot closer to "pile of meat with a bread yarmulke."

"How do you manage to put all of that away?" Dason asked as Valentina picked up her fork and knife. He still got surprised every time he saw the damn thing.

"Simple," Valentina said, spreading mustard over one corner of the pile and taking a bite. "I eat it."

"Vale," Dason cautioned, "I've seen what you do to that damn thing. What you do is not eating. It's carnage."

"Tomato, tomahto," Valentina said before she descended onto the nominal sandwich like a wolf onto the fold.

They ate with various degrees of viciousness, and Dason covered the check despite Valentina's protests to the contrary.

Once Vale had slipped into a meat coma back at the house, Dason considered heading up to an early bed as well. He'd fought hard that day and the ache had seeped into his bones to the point where he had to drag himself upstairs and struggle into his jammies.

However, before he lapsed into his own unconsciousness, he sent a quick message to Koi.

**Dason:** Hey. Are you going to be doing turf war tomorrow?  
**Koi:** yeh bro. itll be a lil late, but ill be there. just means you can get a warmup in b4 we squad, right?  
**Dason:** Cool. Let me know when you're ready and we'll do the thing.  
**Koi:** fo sho man. see you tomorrow

As much as he enjoyed playing with Valentina, it wouldn't hurt either of them to make friends outside of each other. Dason smiled as he lay back onto his bed and let sleep take him.

He was gone before he even hit the pillow.


	2. Chapter 2

"On your left!" Koi shouted, and Dason ducked down to avoid getting hit in the head with a burst bomb. Koi came up behind Dason and fired a shot from his luna blaster before moving forward to chase after the person that had tried to take out his partner.

Koi and Dason had been partnering up for about two weeks, now, at least on the days that he and Valentina weren't hitting the matches. He was winning four games out of five, he had a pretty decent nest egg built up, and life was good.

Unfortunately, this seemed like that fifth game. Even though Dason and Koi were trying to push back against the tide of blue ink, one of their teammates had fucked off before the battle even started, while the other probably needed to wear a helmet in order to prevent further brain damage.

Of course, Dason wasn't the one that said such a thing. Valentina would have called Koi mean, rude, nasty, and a mess of other things for even hinting at something so unpleasant, but Dason had laughed at the notion, and seeing a hydra splatling that was inking more wall than turf reinforced the idea.

Perhaps the other inkling really was touched in the head.

"Son of a bitch!" Dason said as the buzzer went off. He scowled and looked like he was about to throw the Nozzlenose on the ground, but he restrained himself. There was no contest, and Judd pointed over at the enemy team's base almost immediately. "Fuck!" Dason swore again.

"Hey," Koi said as he reached out to rest a hand on Dason's shoulder, "Don't lose your cool. That's the first match we've lost today."

"We should have won that one, too!" Dason said as he kicked the wall without flinching. As their third teammate passed by, Dason snarled at him, "At least we might have had a chance if our third teammate wasn't a few sandwiches short of a picnic!"

The young inkling with the hydra splatling hunched his shoulders and began to walk away in shame, and Koi's face remained impassive.

This was probably the first time that Koi had seen Dason blow up like that, and if Dason locked gazes with him, he would have seen that Koi was weighing Dason, measuring him, and that every little bit of information that Koi collected was getting filed away for later use.

"Dason, dude, you didn't have to blow up at him like that," Koi said.

In return, Dason flopped onto a bench and leaned back to let out a long exhale. "Yeah. You're right. I just need to blow off some steam. I shouldn't have gone for him like that."

Koi began putting his Luna Blaster away in near silence, his movements methodical and practiced enough that Dason was pretty sure that Koi would have been able to disassemble the weapon and put it away in his sleep. "You know," Koi said, that almost cavalier tone back in his voice. He had an expression that was bordering on a smile on his face, and the twinkle of one certainly lingered in his eyes. "I know a pretty good way to blow off some steam."

Dason straightened up and stared at Koi even as he began to disassemble his nozzlenose and put it away. "I'm all ears, then."

Koi kept his voice low and said, "Rent us an overnight locker. We don't want to be lugging this stuff around and it'll be easier if we don't head home."

Dason's brow furrowed in suspicion as he complied with what Koi asked. This was definitely something sketchy, shady, or possibly illegal.

At this point, Dason wasn't really sure if he cared.

"Screw it," he said as he practically chucked his gear case into the overnight locker. "Let's do the damn thing."

"That's what I want to hear," Koi said with a laugh. He clapped Dason on the shoulder and they began to make their way out of the lobby. "So here's the rundown. I have a friend that taught me how to do this, and now I'm teaching you. Always makes me feel good whenever I'm having a rough day."

"So what is it?" Dason asked, still suspicious.

"Let's wait a little bit before we talk about it," Koi said as he and Dason walked past a large sign that said "Coming soon! Grizzco Industries!"

Dason had a feeling that it wouldn't take off. Not when the outfits looked that over-the-top ridiculous.

Seriously? Who even wore coveralls anymore except for farmers? Nobody worth mentioning, that's who.

Koi turned them onto a lightly-populated street where nobody except for a couple of people in front of coffee shops lingered with newspapers held practically to noses, and he told Dason about the plan. "We're just going to go for a little joyride."

Dason froze and stared at Koi who, for his part, did not stop.

"You're serious?" Dason asked, and Koi gave a wolfish grin right back over his shoulder.

"Come on, Dason. You've never done something like this before?"

"No," Dason said, "And I'm pretty sure that I don't think I want to."

"What's the harm in it?" Koi said, trying to make it sound like it was sneaking a bottle of beer from the fridge instead of committing an act of larceny.

"My mom will shit a brick if she finds out," Dason said flatly, as if to broker no further argument.

Koi, apparently, did not get the memo. "Awwww, is Dason scared of upsetting mommy?"

"No," Dason said, his voice cold. He didn't want to continue down this train of logic, but Koi kept on pressing.

"You've talked to me about her," Koi said, "She's constantly trying to push you to be this person that's absolutely amazing and perfect, all because she works for Squidforce. So your well-being is left in the muck while she climbs higher than higher. Pissing off your mother is probably a good thing at this point." Again, Koi's lips parted to form that wolfish smile.

Dason hated to admit it, but Koi was probably right. His temper was cooling, but the seed of ire still gathered in his stomach ready to burst into a conflagration again. "Let's do it. What do you have in mind?"

Koi clapped Dason on the back and gave a quick bark of laughter before saying, "Alright. First things first, you have to learn how to pick your mark."

Dason arched an eyebrow at that, and Koi explained in a hushed voice as not to alert passerby, "When you're picking out a mark, you have to know your stuff. You don't want anything that looked like it rolled right off the assembly line, and you definitely don't want a sports car."

"Why not?" Dason asked. He thought it would be fun to take a Maseratuna or a BMWoomy for a spin. People that drove those usually had more money than sense.

"Alarms," Koi said, "High-end cars -and new ones as well- usually have their alarms on. If someone really likes the car, it's bound to be not just locked, but alarmed as well. So the second you pop the door or break a window, you're in for a whole lot of trouble. If you're just in it to break something for shits and giggles, then that's a different story."

Dason had the distinct feeling that he should have been afraid of Koi right now, but he kept on listening.

"So you're looking for an older car, but not a shitbox. You want it to be something that looks like it'll be fun to drive, but not too fun. You know, something you wouldn't feel bad wrapping around a lamppost."

Okay, now Dason was scared. But he had the feeling that it was just excitement about what he was about to do. "We're going to crash it?"

"Nah, probably not. Just drive it halfway across town, then ditch it and take the train home," Koi said, and that assuaged Dason's fear somewhat.

"So should we start looking?" Dason asked.

"A couple more blocks, then we should be good," Koi said. "There's a park-n-ride not too far from here. Out of town commuters use it all the time." His gaze shifted up to the sky and he squinted at the sun. "Let's grab a quick snack, first. We still have a little daylight."

Dason's heart was racing. The anticipation was killing him. He was ready to go, to do something naughty, to do something that would piss Kamila off and make her start yelling.

At this point, he didn't really care. He just needed to do something _bad._

Koi didn't seem to care about Dason's apprehension, though. They snagged a pair of hot dogs from a street vendor and made their way over to a bench to nosh before they performed their act of larceny. Dason had his with onions and relish. Koi had his with onion sauce and mustard.

"So," Koi said after swallowing a bite. "Let's see how good your eye is. You know our criteria, so let's start looking."

Dason finished chewing and brought his dog away from his mouth as he stared at Koi. He swallowed and said, "Wait, you mean we're getting one from here?"

"No, you blockhead," Koi said, and the way that he said it, Dason had the feeling that Koi would have probably slapped the back of his head if their hands hadn't been full of processed meat goodness. "I'm just trying to see if you have a good eye for the work."

Dason started to stare out across the street. There were a couple of cars parked on the street, and more that occasionally drove down the one-way avenue. Dason took another bite and chewed thoughtfully, staring out at the cars lined up on the opposite side of the street. "What about the red one?" he asked.

There was a red four-door that was parked almost halfway down the block, a little spotty from rain and driving, but otherwise nice.

"Don't let the dirt fool you," Koi said without even looking, "That one's brand new. Good try, though. Let's look again."

Dason scanned the street again and found another car about two spots down from where they were sitting, a small two-door with a sleek-looking body and a faded blue paintjob. "How about that one?" he asked with a gesture.

"Hmm..." Koi said. The barest flicker of his eyes towards the car betrayed that he was following along with what Dason thought. "Better. No alarm, would be easy to hotwire. Tires are bald, though, so it'll be harder to handle."

Dason frowned and kept on looking up and down the street. There was a minivan which wouldn't be that fun to drive, a truck that was too big, and a battered old vehicle (a "shitbox" like what Koi had been talking about earlier) that had more rust than paint on its body.

"There's no right car on this street," Dason said bitterly.

"Bingo," Koi said as he finished off his dog and licked condiments from his fingers. "There's usually not a perfect car for this anywhere, so you have to look for the next best thing. The blue one was it."

Dason nodded and also finished the last bite of his dog, brushing his hands free of crumbs and misplaced toppings before he and Koi started to walk down the way again. The sun was coming down over the horizon, and the buildings cast long shadows that extended along most of the street, granting Dason and Koi only a few splashes of early-evening golden sunlight. "Alright. You call the mark," Koi said as they made their way into the parking lot for the out-of-town employees, "I'll get us in."

Dason nodded and began scanning the lot for something that tickled his fancy, his face grave, his heart starting to beat faster and faster again.

He kept on scanning around for the mark, and spotted it in the form of a little lime-green thing, about half again as long as he was tall. A compact car that was probably driven by someone that felt timid and didn't want to take up a lot of space on the road. 

"That one," Dason said with a nod, and Koi's face split into a grin, one that seemed much more predatory than before.

"Good call. Looks like it's some dork's car and he's doing it to be more road-conscious," Koi replied as he made his way over and reached into his backpack for a couple of things.

Dason expected a lockpick or something to break in through the window. Instead, Koi withdrew a a wedge with a hose leading to a rubber bulb attached to it, and what looked like a spatula on a telescoping pole. The pole had a trigger on the end that Dason didn't quite want to squeeze because he didn't know what it would do.

"Hold this," Koi said as he stuffed the pole into Dason's hand. "And keep it low."

Dason obliged, extending the arm by a single fragment and holding it by his side while Koi took the wedge and carefully stuffed it into the crack between the driver's side door and the remainder of the car, then started to pump the rubber bulb quickly and urgently, as if someone was really stressed and needed some relief.

"What are you doing?" Dason asked, and Koi held up a single finger in order to pause him before he kept squeezing and kept glancing around. They were out of the reach of the streetlights in the parking lot, and the only people that moved were shadows off in the distance that didn't have anything to do with the cars in the lot.

"Wait... You'll see," Koi replied, and he kept on squeezing the bulb.

Eventually, Dason could see the effects of the bulb. It was pumping air into the wedge, causing it to expand and separate the door from the rest of the car without breaking anything. After a moment, Koi beckoned for Dason to give him the spatula-on-a-stick, and he slipped it into the little opening that the wedge had made.

Koi pulled the trigger once and the spatula quickly turned into a grasping claw with rubber-tipped pincers for better grip. Koi tested the trigger again, and the claw opened and closed experimentally. It seemed the whole mess was spring-loaded.

"Keep an eye out, I'm going to get the door open."

Dason kept on looking around while Koi worked his magic. After the "Shump" of a car's door lock coming undone, Koi let out a satisfied sigh and let the claw dangle inside the car for a moment while he pulled on a pair of gloves.

"What are those for?" Dason asked as he went around to the other side of the car, his voice incredulous.

"Well, you can't drive without gloves, can you?" Koi said as if the answer was obvious. "Also, fingerprints."

Dason paused as he stopped reaching for the door and moved his hoodie's sleeve to cover his hand before Koi unlocked the other door and started putting away the stuff he'd used to break in.

"Right," Koi said as Dason sat down in the car's passenger seat. Koi had a screwdriver and was popping open the console underneath the steering column. He passed something to Dason and said, "Here. Just in case this doesn't work."

Dason looked down into his hands and froze. There was a switchblade there. Why would Koi need a knife if he couldn't hotwire the car?

Koi beckoned Dason to move over to where he had the console popped open, and said, "Alright. Two wires. This one goes to the ignition, this one goes to the battery. Touch them together, get the whole thing going and..."

Koi tapped the exposed tips of the two wires together, and the car roared to life.

Well... it didn't so much "roar" as it "yawned squeakily, like a puppy just waking up from a nap."

"Booyah!" Koi said as he slammed his door shut. Dason followed suit as Koi dropped the car into reverse and threw the car back out of its parking spot before cranking the wheel and sending the car into a spin.

Dason hollered, part in fear, part in excitement, but mostly because he was still trying to put his seatbelt on with his goofy mitten sleeve things. "Whaaaaaaaaat are you doing!" Dason said as Koi peeled out of the car lot.

"Let's go!" Koi hollered louder than the engine went.

Dason's seatbelt clicked and Koi reached over to snap the switchblade out of his hand before tucking it back into his pocket. "Yeah!" Koi hollered as he dropped down both of the windows, letting the cool evening air rush in and blast the two inklings in their faces.

"Dason!" Koi hollered as he ran a red light and took an illegal left turn. "You having fun?"

Dason stared at the city lights and cars that went by. Koi may have seemed like he was driving recklessly, but he was still careful not to hit pedestrians.

Dason felt a shout welling up in his throat, and Koi seemed to time it perfectly, because their voices ripped out in a roar of defiance against the laws of the world.

For the first time in a while, Dason felt truly alive.


	3. Chapter 3

Dason came back late. And by "late," we mean "later than usual," and even "late enough that he needed to sneak in through the garage so he didn't get caught unawares by his mom and grounded for a month."

Which, of course, is exactly what happened.

He was still riding the adrenaline high from his little joyride with Koi, and his face was split in the dumbest grin that he'd ever worn in his entire life.

"You're home late."

That stopped Dason dead in his tracks. He turned around to see Kamila sitting in the shadows in a high-backed reading chair like she was some kind of villain from a spy movie. She turned on the lamp on the end table next to her, and a tired but stern face stared out at him.

Even through all of this, Dason couldn't stop grinning. He was vibrating from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes, and he wanted to go for a three-mile run right at that moment. "Hi, Kamila."

She frowned at that, and rose to cross the space between them. She leaned in and sniffed near Dason, which only deepened the frown.

"Have you been drinking?"

"Nope," Dason said, and that much was the truth.

"Doing drugs?"

"No."

"Why do you have that stupid smile on your face, then? Are you hiding something from me?"

"Nah," Dason said dismissively. She just hadn't been asking the right questions.

Kamila leaned back and folded her arms in front of her like she expected an answer right at that moment, and her scowl practically screamed that she wanted to know where the hell he had been.

When neither of them said anything, Kamila gestured with one hand and asked only "Well?"

Dason couldn't help but laugh at that, to the point where he actually doubled over and needed a moment to right himself. Kamila was getting more and more pissed off by the second.

"What's so fucking funny?" Kamila asked, and any pretense that she was trying to act motherly disappeared.

"Just this whole situation," Dason said once he was able to reply. A few giggles slipped past his lips despite himself, but he managed to maintain his composure for the most part. The adrenaline still surged through him at the mere thought of what he was doing, at how he was calling Kamila out for her bullshit, and how it felt so good. 

Kamila gave Dason a look that demanded an explanation. Just this once, he felt the need to oblige her.

"You've been sitting here who knows how long," Dason said, "Waiting to grill me, and for what?"

Kamila fumed, and Dason could almost see the steam wafting out of her ears as it was. "Where. Have you. Been?"

"My friend and I stole a car and almost crashed it into a wall just for the hell of it."

Might as well tell her the truth. It's not like she'd believe him anyways.

"What has gotten into you today?" Kamila snarled, and Dason had to suppress the urge to laugh again. Of course there was no way that she'd believe him. It was too far out of left field to fit into her definition of "sane."

"I just had a really good day," Dason said, "And I had a pretty awesome night, too. And now I come home only for you to give me the third degree?"

"I'm your mother," Kamila said as if that explained everything. Her voice held a deadly edge to it that made it seem like a sword was resting just under Dason's chin.

"And when, in the past few years, have you acted the part?" Dason said, and he knew that he was going to regret where this went even as he said it.

Kamila's voice turned so soft that it would have almost been comforting. "Excuse me?"

He was in this deep, so he might as well keep going. "You have not acted like my mother since before Dad left. You've been so focused on your career that Vale and I have practically had to raise each other. Hell, I'm beginning to think that you don't even think we're your children, but that we're just supposed to be the models of good inkling conduct in turf wars so you look even better at work."

"Dason," Kamila said, not even bothering to hide the anger in her voice, restrained as it was. "Go to your room."

"See? This is exactly what I'm talking about. You don't act like a parent anytime except for when you have to dish out punishment."

"Room. Now." Kamila's voice sounded firmer, but Dason could tell that she was shaken.

"You know what? No," Dason said as he turned back towards the front door. "I'm going for a walk."

Kamila's hand reached out and grabbed Dason's shoulder with iron fingers, and he winced at the pain for a moment before he turned around to stare at Kamila.

"You are going to your room," Kamila said, very quietly, "And you are not allowed to participate in Turf Wars for a month. If I find out that you've been breaking that rule, I will see to it that you are permanently banned from the Association. Do you understand me?"

Dason frowned. He thought he'd been winning this argument, but she still held a lot more of the cards than he would have liked. "Yes," he said, though he made a point of omitting the "ma'am" that he would have added on the end.

"Good. Now go," Kamila said as she pointed at the stairs.

Dason began his plodding climb. Three stairs up, Kamila said, "And Dason?"

He paused and stared back down at her. She had folded her arms across her chest in what Dason thought was a defensive stance, but he could tell that her eyes held equal parts sternness and satisfaction. "If you ever speak like that to me again," she said, "You will no longer be welcome under this roof. Are. We. Clear?"

Dason's frown deepened to a scowl, and he growled, "Crystal." Before he continued making his way up the stairs.

He changed into his pajamas and threw himself into bed, checking his phone before he went to sleep.

**Vale:** hey. i heard everythin  
 **Vale:** u ok?

Dason winced internally at that. He'd probably woken her up.

**Dason:** Yeah. I'm fine. Just kind of snapped at her today.  
 **Vale:** u shouldnt do tht  
 **Dason:** I know. I'm grounded for a month, though, so you're going to have to play without me.  
 **Vale:** :(  
 **Vale:** ill hang out w/ u. i dont want to turf war on my own knowing u can't pull ur weight  
 **Dason:** Alright. Want to get some burgers tomorrow?  
 **Vale:** sure thing big bro  
 **Vale:** goodnite  
 **Dason:** Sleep well.

He locked his phone and plugged it in. He had to resist the urge to go down the hall and hug his sister as hard as he could. A lot of the time, it just felt like the two of them against the world, and he had nobody else that he could trust.

Well... at least there was Koi, now. He didn't have the same history with Koi that he did with Vale, but at the very least, he knew that he could count on Koi for a good time.

Sleep came, and Dason dreamed about the wind in his tentacles again as he had stuck his head out the window of their stolen ride.

***

"So you were hanging out with Koi last night?" Valentina asked around a mouthful of her burger. They were at a place that was called "The House of the Rising Bun," a joint that looked like a classic diner from the 1950s and had all of its burgers named after puns on famous human songs.

"Yup," Dason said. He had ordered for himself "The Real Swiss Shroomy" while Vale had gotten the "I Write Onions, not Trage-cheese." It was simple enough fare, but all of the burgers were served cooked to perfection, and anyone that wanted theirs well-done was politely, yet firmly asked to leave.

"What did you do?"

"You heard me talking to Kamila last night," Dason said around a mouthful of food.

Valentina gave him an even stare.

"What?!" Dason said in exasperation, "I wasn't lying!"

"When did you learn how to hijack a car?"

"Literally last night!"

"Sounds fake. I don't believe it," Valentina replied as she took a bite of her own burger. Dason stared at her in mild disbelief. Was it really so hard to believe that he had been a bad and naughty crime boy the night before?

His phone went off, and he wiped his hands on the napkin in his lap before he read the text from Koi.

**Koi:** suh dude. wanna hang 2day?  
 **Dason:** I'd be down. I'm getting lunch with my sister, but I'm free all day after that.  
 **Koi:** sweet. meet me @ the Swimclair on Bass and Haddock in abt an hour

Dason put his phone down. The corner of Bass and Haddock wasn't even a fifteen minute walk away from The House of the Rising Bun, so he didn't have to rush.

"Who was that?" Valentina asked as she waved a french fry at him.

Dason reached up and snagged the fry from Valentina's fingers, eating it despite her protests. She returned the favor by stealing one from his own plate as he spoke.

"Koi. Asking to hang out."

"Hmm..." Valentina mused, "Going to steal another car?"

"You still don't believe me, do you?"

"Nope."

"Then stop bringing it up. Besides, he and I are probably just going to wind up heading to an arcade or something," Dason replied.

" _How vewy gwown up of youww,_ " Valentina mocked him.

"Well it's not like I can do turf war," Dason replied with a shrug.

Valentina winced. He did have a point, there.

"Alright, so how long do you have before you have to meet him?" she said.

"About an hour. We can finish up and split a shake if you'd like. My treat."

Valentina's face lit up at that. She wound up ordering the flavor, since she had the bigger sweet tooth out of the two of them, and they split (Valentina got the lion's share) a strawberry milkshake with rainbow sprinkles and blueberry whipped cream.

Fruity desserts weren't really Dason's speed, so he was more than happy to let Valentina enjoy the majority of it.

After they finished eating and paid (Valentina still insisted on paying half the bill), they stepped out with bickering passing between them.

"Listen," Valentina said defensively, "I like strawberry. I like blueberry. I was determined to enjoy it, so I ate."

"Vale, I've seen eating. That wasn't eating. That was pure chaos," Dason replied. He was pretty sure that he had been in the splash zone and that he had a spatter of something on his shirt.

"Oh, like you've never gone that hard on a sandwich!" Valentina shot back.

"I've gone in on a hoagie before, but never to the point where the wait staff hid in fear from me until I left the store!"

"They did not!"

"I'm pretty sure that the seating hostess drew the short straw as to who needed to take our check," Dason said dryly, and Valentina laughed.

"You had the fry cooks placing bets as to whether or not you were an inkling that time," Valentina pointed out. "They thought that you might be half-Sharknado."

"Sharknadoes aren't even real things," Dason said as he waved a dismissive hand at his sister.

"They totally are! I know a guy who worked with a dude that swears he saw one while working out on the shoals."

This banter continued for a good ten minutes as they made their way down Bass. Valentina's bus stop was about a block earlier than Haddock, so they parted ways with a warm hug and a farewell of "dumbass" from Dason and "fucker" from Valentina.

He continued to walk towards Haddock and looked across the street to see Koi standing walking along towards the Swimclair gas station.

"Hey, Koi!" Dason said as he spotted his friend. He waved and jogged across the street to fall in step with the other inkling.

"Sup, man?" Koi said with a jerk of his head. He was wearing a jacket and a backpack, and had his hands tucked into the jacket pockets as he walked along. Strange. It wasn't that cold.

"Just dropping off my sister at the bus stop," Dason said as he pointed back at the stop. The bus had already come and gone, so Valentina was already well on her way, but Koi nodded.

"I saw. Thought she might be your girlfriend or something like that. You two argue like an old couple."

"We're siblings, man," Dason said in exasperation. He'd heard that a lot from people that didn't know his and Vale's relationship, maybe because they seemed a lot closer than siblings. They were, but not in the way that people thought. They were best friends as well as relatives.

Dason explained this to Koi, who nodded in understanding even as they got to the convenience store. Koi snagged a couple of things from the shelves and a bottle of cola from the fridge case. Dason just got himself a cup of coffee and added a bit of powdered creamer to give it some color. They both paid and started to walk down Haddock towards downtown.

"So what's the plan for today?" Dason asked.

"Listen, man," Koi said as he struggled with the wrapper on a Whatsamajingus candy bar, "Did you have fun last night?"

Just thinking about the adrenaline tingle made a ghost of it come back.

"Yeah," Dason said with a grin, "I had a blast. Why?"

"Want to do more stuff like that? Just for fun?" Koi asked quietly, as if they were being watched.

Dason bit his lower lip. He'd loved the feeling that the experience had given him, but it had really pissed off Kamila.

Considering how shitty of a mom she'd been, though, Dason might have considered that a bonus.

"Sure," Dason said with conviction, "I'm in. Where should we start?"

Koi's face split into a grin. "Let's head to the mall, then."

***

Arowana Mall, despite the advent of online shopping, had still managed to remain relevant and ahead of the curve, meaning that there were a lot of crowds there on a regular basis... especially on Turf War days.

Dason and Koi stood in a crowd as a pair of teams started to lay down ink at the start of the match. They were both teams of Senior Squidizens, but they still moved like they were in the springtime of their youth. The assembled crowd cheered for every play, and groaned on the particularly painful splats.

Koi looked over at Dason and held a finger up to his lips, calling for quiet. He reached into the bag that he'd brought and removed a couple of items as they got further and further into the crowd.

One of them was a rather curious contraption where it appeared to be a pillowcase with a plastic coat hanger holding it open. The other was... a straight razor?

As Koi flipped it open to reveal that the item was, in fact, a straight razor, Dason swallowed. He didn't know where this was going, but sharp objects in this crowded of a space was usually a bad sign.

So, naturally, he breathed a sigh of relief as Koi went up behind a woman with a large shoulder bag and began slowly drawing the razor's blade on the underside of the bag with a gentle grace, the pillowcase extended to catch everything that fell out.

The woman never even noticed.

Dason watched as bits of makeup, a phone, and a wallet fell out and landed squarely in the pillowcase, much to Koi's excitement. Nobody seemed to be noticing. Everyone was so busy watching the match.

Koi looked back at Dason and gave a wink and that same wolfish smile as before as Koi repeated the process with four more bags before he replaced everything into his backpack shortly before the match ended.  
Afterwards, the crowd dispersed, and Dason and Koi made their way to a quiet corner where they could loot what they found.

The first thing that happened was that Koi went through each of the wallets and removed all the cash in them, stuffing that into a jacket pocket quickly so nobody saw. He then took all of the other valuables (for some reason, pill bottles were "valuable") and dropped those into another pocket of the backpack.

Things like makeup went into the trash, unless it was really high-end. Dason didn't know high-end from low, but apparently Koi did, and separated them out into their respective piles quickly and efficiently like a cashier at a casino's money cage.

When everything was said and done, Koi straightened up and gave Dason two wallets.

"What are these for?" Dason asked.

"We're not total monsters," Koi said with a scoff. "That's people's credit cards, their family photos, that sort of thing. You're going to turn those in, one at a time, to two completly different security guards on opposite ends of the mall, and I'll do the same. The rest, we'll leave in dressing rooms at a couple of shops to make sure that they get back to the right people."

That was... strangely considerate.

"And the money?"

"We split it at the end of the day," Koi said as he grinned and jerked his head towards the splatterfield. "Next match is starting. Let's see how steady your hand is."


	4. Chapter 4

Dason learned things in his time with Koi. Things that he couldn't have learned in a school, or even from a tutor, mainly on account of how illegal they were.

Within in a month, he was able to pick locks of most varieties, and (on a good day) open combination padlocks by touch.

He knew how to hotwire most kinds of vehicles, ranging from tucks all the way down to motorcycles. For those that he didn't, there was always the "switchblade into the ignition" trick that Koi had hinted at during their first joyride.

Of course, this wasn't the kind of thing that he could really talk to Valentina about.

But she was able to see some changes in him.

They sat at their usual spot in the deli, a surprisingly busy late-afternoon bustle around them as Valentina stared at him across their plates.

Surprisingly, Dason had ordered something with a little more red meat than usual...

Alright, a lot more.

The sandwich on his plate wasn't exactly a true sandwich. It was a little more of a pile of meat on top of a measley piece of bread, slathered with and mustard and horseradish, and a final piece of bread tossed almost haphazardly on top as if the chef decided "you know what, this thing is an abomination and I don't want it in front of me anymore. Take this bread fez and fuck off."

Naturally, Dason was eating it with a knife and fork. If he had tried to take on that two-pound monstrosity with his hands, Valentina probably would have spoken up sooner.

"Are you okay?" Valentina asked, and Dason looked up at her with a mouth full of beef.

"Mmnf?" Dason asked.

"Are you okay?" Valentina repeated, and Dason chewed and swallowed, exhaling a particularly horseradishy breath that caused Valentina to wave her hand in front of her face and clear the air.

"Yeah, I'm fine," Dason said. At least he thought he was okay. Valentina, however, was of a different mind on the subject.

"You're eating something that I would normally order... and you've been spending a lot of late nights out," Valentina said, her voice cautious.

"I've been hanging out with Koi," Dason said. That much was true. He hoped that she wouldn't press the issue further.

"What have you been doing?" Valentina asked, pressing the issue further.

Dason frowned. "Stuff."

"What kind of stuff?"

"Things."

"What kind of things, Dason?"

"Stuff and things," he said.

"You're avoiding the question."

Dason's frown deepened by a couple of degrees.

"I'm worried about you," Valentina confessed. She could tell that he was getting close to being in a fell mood, but she didn't want to see him getting into trouble.

"Why?" Dason asked, and his voice held a tone of accusation.

"Well, I haven't met this Koi guy," Valentina began, "And you and Mom haven't really been talking a lot since you started hanging out with him."

That much had been true. To tell the truth, he hadn't been able to stand being in the same room with her since their little tiff almost a month before.

She hadn't continued to bother him about coming home late, and he'd done his chores like a good, dutiful son without being asked. He honestly had the feeling that things would continue to go that way unless Dason snapped at her again (which was liable to happen the next time he opened his mouth towards her), or law enforcement brought him home in cuffs.

Both were equally likely, to tell the truth. There had been a couple of close shaves when he'd been out with Koi.

"She's not getting in my business, and I'm not getting in hers," Dason said with a shrug.

"You're distant," Valentina said. It wasn't accusatory. It was just fact.

"Well yeah. I don't want to talk to her. I think of her less and less as my mother every day."

A glimmer of shock passed through Valentina's eyes, fleeting, and she let out a sigh.

"I mean you've been distant from me," she said.

Dason paused with a mound of rare pastrami halfway towards his mouth, then frowned. "What do you mean? We get lunch at least every week."

"Last week, you bailed early because you got a call from Koi."

"He needed help with something."

"And the week before that, you didn't even show up because, and I quote," she pulled out her phone and scrolled through the recent messages, "'Can't talk right now. Need to turn my phone off. I'll talk to you soon.'"

Dason winced. They had been hiding from a couple of assholes with baseball bats that didn't like the fact that Koi had persuaded Dason to slash the tires of their sports car.

Though, in their defense, they had been driving like idiots, almost hit an old lady using the crosswalk, and had been catcalling every cute girl they saw.

"I was in a meeting?" Dason said, and it was a transparent lie.

"A meeting that lasted until the next day, when you finally decided to text me back at three in the morning?" Valentina asked with a frown.

Dason let out a sigh. He couldn't tell her what he'd been up to. She wouldn't run and tell Kamila, mainly because she knew that "Mom" was about as authoritarian as a fascist dictatorship.

But she wouldn't hesitate to give him an earful.

Dason remained silent, and he set down his fork and knife to stare into the shapes of the meat piled on his plate, and searched for something to say.

He was a little startled when Valentina reached out and rested her hand on his own.

Dason looked up to see a gentle smile on her face, her eyes slightly sad. "I care about you," she said, "And I don't like seeing you like this."

Dason nodded and picked up his fork and knife again to take another bite. The tears in his eyes were because the horseradish was spicy, no other reason, what the fuck are you looking at?

"I'll talk to Koi," he said after a few more bites. Valentina hadn't touched her food in the meantime. "You're right. I'm not myself. I'm... I'm letting my anger at Kamila get to me."

He could feel Valentina's sympathetic expression as she looked at him, and she nodded. "You have to be careful with that. The last time you got really angry, you were almost kicked out of school."

Dason shuddered. He'd had a couple of bullies when he was in early high school that had thrown his bookbag in the dumpster, spilled juice on his homework, and even stole his gym uniform so he had to miss a week's worth of gym class until he could get another.

It finally came to a head behind the bleachers after school, as so many bullies seemed to conduct their business, where the leader had talked about making a pass at Valentina.

Dason had never told Vale that part, but it was enough to make him black out.

When he came to, he had the gym teacher and the basketball coach holding him back by one arm each, and all four of the bullies were lying on the ground, either unconscious or skittering away from him.

Kamila had been furious. Dason didn't remember what happened, but apparently his hearsay accounts about what they had done to him didn't fly well, and even some of his teachers that had seen the results of the bullying didn't step in "out of sake of fairness."

He'd been given one week in-school suspension because Kamila "didn't want him getting a vacation" because of the fight. She'd even asked Dason's teachers to give him additional work as a form of punishment.

His bullies got off scot-free. After all, when the dog bites back against an abusive owner, it's the dog's fault, not the human's.

They hadn't fucked with him for the rest of the year, though, nor any of the years that followed.

And they never touched Valentina.

Dason looked up at Valentina and smiled, despite the thoughts and memories that crossed his mind, and he took off the bread yarmukle and tugged the pressed-flat bread out from under its mountain of meaty goodness. Both were slathered in beef juice, horseradish, and mustard, and Dason held them up by one corner each. It was a surprise they didn't come undone.

"Listen, Vale. I go off the rails again, you have the right to take these two pieces of bread, smear them on either side of my face, and demand that I call myself an idiot sandwich."

Valentina laughed at that, and she reached out to take them from his fingers. She stared down at them and said, "You know what, I think I'm going to do that right now!"

She leaned across the table, and Dason had to lean out of reach to make sure that she didn't touch him with the soggy, pungent slices. They both laughed, and for the first time in a while, Dason felt good.

Three hours later? Not so much.

His stomach was a roiling cauldron, not from the excessively large meal he'd eaten earlier, but from anxiety. He tried to measure his breathing, kept his posture confident... or as confident as he could make it. He even wore shades so Koi wouldn't see the fear in his eyes.

"Yo, dawg," Koi said behind Dason.

They were meeting in an alleyway, which was sketchy enough as it was, and Dason was wearing a hoodie and sunglasses, which made him look like a drug dealer even excluding the alleyway component.

Koi, on the other hand, looked like a normal guy in a t-shirt and jeans that was taking a shortcut home. "What's the story, big hoss?"

He was using nicknames to make Dason feel more comfortable. Now that Dason had time to think about it, he'd been doing that quite a bit. He could probably count on one hand the number of times that Koi had called him by his name since that initial joyriding incident.

"I don't think I want to hang out anymore," Dason said. The words all came out in a rush, and he realized that he didn't have to hide the fear in his eyes because it came through loud and clear in his voice.

"What?" Koi said with a slight laugh. It almost sounded nervous. "Why not?"

"I don't think that us hanging out together is a good idea," Dason said. That much was the truth. He decided to explain further, though.

"I'm getting more and more distant from my family, they're starting to worry about me, and I don't want anything that we do together to backfire on them if I get in trouble," Dason explained.

Koi's smile faded, inch by inch, and he said, "Your family thinks that I'm a bad influence on you."

"I haven't told them about anything that we've done," Dason said. "Kamila would freak, and Valentina would be scared for me. I don't want them dealing with that."

"So you're valuing a control freak and a scaredy-cat over your best friend?" Koi said, and Dason's eyes snapped up to meet his. He at least thought that he was looking at Koi's eyes. There were clouds floating on the edges of his vision that made it a little hard to see.

"You want to run that by me again?" Dason said, his voice as cold and hard as Antarctic bedrock.

"Listen, man," Koi said as he backed up, his hands raised in surrender. "I'm just saying that I've watched your back in the past, you know? When the cops were closing in on us after stealing that Grouperghini, I had you make a break for it while I stayed back and prepared to take the heat. They didn't know where I was, so that's the only reason why we're standing here today. And what about those guys in the Swordfish? They came after us with-"

"Baseball bats," Dason said, his voice still stony, "I know. You kept me out of trouble because you knew that I could help you out later." He didn't know if that was true, but he knew that it made sense. It gave him more and more reasons to walk away. "I'm done. I'm out. Thanks for the good times, Koi, but I'm done with all of this."

Koi stared at him for a while, and Dason could see the wheels turning in his head. Koi had always been the smarter of the two of them, and in this moment, Dason could see Koi performing calculations, cost versus gain.

For a moment, Dason thought he was like Kamila. He didn't like the thought.

"Alright. Alright. That's fair," Koi said as he held up his hands, "We're square. It was fun running with you for a while, but if you want to back out, I'm not sour about it."

Dason turned and walked away with a nod, and he thought that was that.

Even so, Dason could have sworn he heard his former friend mutter the words "hell to pay" under his breath.

Dason just prayed that he would be the one paying, and not someone else.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This'll get a bit dark.

Sometimes, a person must resort to means that they would not under other circumstances. Sometimes, a person must reach out to another person that owes them a debt and demand that they pay it off in a way other than the money initially agreed-upon. Sometimes, that debt is rooted in a bad decision to purchase brandy for an after-dinner aperitif when you should have been spying on a government official for the purpose of writing your magnum opus. Sometimes, that debt is based on the simple fact that you really wanted that new Xbox 9000, complete with a direct uplink to the overlords at Macrosoft.

Sometimes, debt can have consequences that nobody could ever figure out, such as fashion changes or the assassination of a world leader.

Only one of those consequences is relevant today.

Of course, the concept of debts, repayment, and the sudden and unexpected deaths of elected officials via a glass of poisoned brandy were not presently on Dason's mind. What was on his mind was the layout of Kelp Dome and how he and Valentina could best obtain victory. It had been a week and change since Dason and Koi had gone their separate ways.

Valentina's weapon was better suited for inking while Dason's was more combat-oriented, and they knew their parts well, but there was always the issue of the wild cards that flanked them on either side.

One of them held a carbon roller while the other carried an inkbrush. Both looked like they knew what they were doing, but Dason knew just enough about brushes and rollers to get by and fight back against them.

The match started, and Dason and Valentina broke off in two different directions, with her focusing on inking the area just outside of spawn while he made his way forward up one side and over into the area near their base. The inkbrush and roller fought towards the center and met the enemy there, so it was all Dason could do in order to take some of the pressure off of them. He was fast enough that he could splat someone and fall back to a more easily defended position, and he knew to look up onto the walkways in order to spot someone that was up to no good, starting to make trouble in the neighborhood.

He got splatted by an enemy with a tri-slosher, and Dason saw that Valentina was back at spawn as well.

"You alright?" He asked.

"Yeah. There's just a splattershot that's out there giving me grief. Everywhere I turn, he's trying to nab me."

"I'll keep an eye out," Dason said just before they went back out. Dason inked up a little more turf as he advanced towards a different holding point while Valentina super-jumped to one of their allies.

For a bit, he kept his eyes on the hud provided by the respawn chip that was currently clipped to the hem of his sweater, and saw that the teams were evenly matched, a bit of push and pull, give and take.

Valentina got splatted again, and Dason saw an inkling, maybe a year older than him, waving bye to her with a splattershot pro in hand.

Dason made a note to keep an eye on that guy.

Two more times over the course of the next minute, Valentina got splatted by the same inkling. It would have been more if it wasn't for the fact that Dason was trying to keep him off his sister's back. They were losing the match as a result, but Dason knew that there was something fishy going on here.

The three of them met again in the center, with the splattershot's ink flying past while they stood on the center platform. He didn't even seem to be paying attention to Dason, instead keeping his fire on Valentina, who fired a shot at him that caused him to duck back.

She climbed up the center tower, jumping up into the air with a note of triumph in her voice as she opened fire on her enemy, only to catch his boot right in the middle of her chest, knocking her down and back.

It was an illegal move for sure, and the monitor watching the match would call it immediately.

"Teal player two, full contact infraction. Please exit to your spawn," the monitor said over the loudspeaker.

Dason couldn't help but watch as Valentina fell, her body flailing in slow-motion.

She landed back-first, and all the air came out of her with a noise that couldn't be mistaken for anything except for a body hitting the ground. What made it even worse was the hard "thwack" of Valentina's head on the concrete of the massive arboreum.

Dason's eyes widened in shock as he watched the scene, and he ran over to crouch next to Valentina. He cradled her head in his hands, but she was unconscious. He could at least see that she was breathing.

That same fury that had taken him in middle school overtook him now, and he quickly ascended the tower as he could see the other inkling start to super-jump back to spawn.

Dason stopped him, grabbing hold and preparing to beat the other inkling to a pulp, when he remembered one of Koi's offhand lessons.

Never punch someone in the face. The face is full of nasty things like beaks that could split your knuckles, or worse, break your fingers.

Dason held the other inkling -he looked terrified- by the collar and raised his Nozzlenose with a rictus of rage on his face.

He brought the weapon down onto the other inkling's head, and he heard the wet pounding sound as the other inkling reeled after the Nozzlenose struck his face.

The intercom blared, "Orange player three, assault with turf war weapon outside of its intended use. Please exit to your spawn."

Dason didn't hear it. He raised his nozzlenose again and brought it down onto the other inkling's face once more, and a small chip of white beak launched out of the inkling's mouth, accompanied by bloody spittle. As if the pain of having the cracked beak was more intense than a piece of unforgiving metal hitting you in the face, the other inkling started to scream in agony, his hands flailing around in order to push Dason off.

Dason cuffed him, breaking the rule that Koi had taught him, and a small voice in the back of his head said "You're only making this worse. You need to stop."

Dason quashed that little voice with a snarl, and flipped the Nozzlenose in his hands so he held it by the barrel. The tube to the ink tank on his back disconnected, and he slammed the butt of the weapon into the other inkling's face, and he felt the crunch of split cartilage as he broke the inkling's nose.

The inkling screamed louder, and Dason felt a pair of arms wrap around his torso and haul him off. The inkling he'd been pounding on until a moment ago scrambled away and super-jumped back to the spawn.

"Aggravated assault between teams unbefitting turf war. Ending match in thirty seconds. All conscious members of both teams please return to your spawns or face suspension from the turf war league," the intercom said.

Immediately, the inkling that had been holding Dason back let him go and made their own super-jump back to spawn, but Dason didn't stop. He made a mad dash for the enemy spawn. Under normal circumstances, an inkling couldn't climb up to the enemy spawn on Kelp Dome, but Dason was filled with the fury of a grease fire, and clambered up without even dropping his nozzlenose. He stared at the enemy team with eyes full of hate, huddled in their spawn, and reached out with one hand.

Something that a lot of people didn't know about the way the spawn worked in turf war was that it was composed of a sheet of heated and concentrated, near-invisible ink that was colored just enough with the team's color that they could pass through it without worry and that any attacks would break on them like waves on the shore.

Dason didn't know this particular information, nor did he particularly care. His hand pressed against the entryway to the enemy spawn, and he felt the barrier's heat, but he didn't let that stop him. He let out a defiant roar and pushed even harder so his hand could reach out towards the inkling that had hurt his sister. All four members of the enemy team had their eyes wide in fear as Dason's hand pushed inexorably closer to the one of them that had blood leaking from both nostrils and bubbling at one corner of their mouth.

Dason pushed harder. It hurt like someone was taking a ring of hot wire around his arm, and his hand grabbed and clutched at the air just beyond it in order to try and grab hold of something, anything.

Dimly, he heard the intercom say "Orange player three. Attempt to enter enemy spawn. Increasing spawn barrier power."

Dason didn't hear it even as he screamed in pain and rage as the barrier's power increased, and the heat started to sear his face. His chin couldn't pass through no matter how hard he tried, no matter how loudly he screamed, and he smelled cooking flesh as he pushed even harder.

Somehow, the pain didn't really register after a certain point. After a while, it just became numbness of such a quality that you knew that you should have been feeling *something*.

"You... hurt... my sister!" Dason roared, and all four members of the enemy team quailed back at the very edge of their spawn as they watched this mad inkling and his rage reaching as far as he could, burning half of his face in the process.

He couldn't keep this up forever, though, and he was launched onto his back, the pain cascading through his body in waves even as the fight response began to dim away.

Two sets of strong hands grabbed him and hauled him away onto a stretcher.

"Did you see that?" one was whispering to the other, though the mouthpieces they wore weren't doing a very good job of hiding what they were saying.

"Kid's fuckin' insane," the other said disdainfully.

"The unconscious one. Do you think that's his sister?"

"Probably."

"So what are we going to do with him?"

"Get him to the hospital. Those burns are going to suck..."

The world faded to black.

Somehow, Dason didn't feel as relieved as he should have.

When he came to, there was a sense of fuzziness throughout most of his body that he assumed was a painkiller of some kind or another, and an itching that covered the right side of his face. The itching faded away at just about his jawline, but there was still a minor itch just along the skin of his neck.

"You're awake," said a familiar voice.

Dason turned his head towards the sound. He could only see out the one eye because the other felt and looked like it was covered in bandages.

Kamila sat in the room with an expression that could have curdled milk, and Dason let out a rasping sigh of disappointment.

"Vale..." he rasped, and Kamila stood to get him a cup of water despite the furious expression on her face.

"She'll be fine. She had a split in her cranium, but they performed some surgery and patched it up. She's asleep, but the doctors think that she'll be fine," Kamila said, and even through the barely restrained ire, there was a sense of relief. “You’re getting discharged today.”

"Good..." Dason said with a sigh. If she was okay, he didn't care what happened to himself.

"Good?" Kamila said, and her voice was deathly quiet. "This situation is anything but good.”

Dason stared at Kamila for a second, as if his gaze was enough to make the mountains crack. Unfortunately, his mother could have made a mountain into a molehill.

“We will speak further after your discharge later today.”

With that, she stood up and left, and Dason took another sip of water to wash the bad taste in his mouth down his throat.

The doctor, a persnickety shrimp named Hennesy, gave him a once-over within a few hours and discharged him with a prescription for painkillers that would keep him numbed until his face got as healed as it was going to be.

Dason almost dumped the pills down the drain of the bathroom as he left, but the itching that covered the right side of his face and his neck stopped him from doing so, and instead encouraged him to pop one into his mouth.

He was surprisingly alert despite the dulling effects of the drugs on his senses, and he made his way back towards his home.

Kamila was waiting for him in the same chair she had been in after his first outing with Koi. “So. Do you care to explain yourself?”

"He attacked her," Dason said matter-of-factly, "I went after him. She's okay, though. So it's good."

"Oh, that other player is being reprimanded as well," Kamila said as she folded her arms. She was still in the charcoal grey suit that she had worn to work this morning, meaning that he was supposed to take this as a business meeting. "But you, Dason," Kamila said, the fury leaking through, "You have made a fool out of yourself, and you have made one out of me."

Of course. This was about her image. Neither of her children could be seen breaking the rules in such an ugly way.

"I managed to convince the other inkling and his family not to press charges," Kamila said. "I had to show them your face. They think that your scars are going to be punishment enough, but that'll be it for them."

Dason got hung up on that one word: scars. How bad were they?

The itching on the right side of his face intensified for a moment, but the painkillers eased that away to barely-noticeable fuzziness.

"And you?" Dason said as the painkillers slurred his speech slightly.

"I'm personally levying a one-year ban from Turf War against you," Kamila said with a cold, even tone.

"That's all?" Dason said with a chuckle that was not entirely his own. Damn drugs.

"You are also no longer allowed under my roof for any reason," Kamila added.

That one stung. Cold fear gripped Dason's stomach, and he turned his head to face her fully. "That's it, huh? Can't afford to have a rule breaker living under your roof, because your image is _so precious_ to you?"

Kamila's lip twitched towards a snarl. "Do you remember what I said I would do the last time that you spoke to me that way?"

"You already did it," Dason said. He struggled not to add on the words "you corrupt harpy" to the end. See? He could be diplomatic. "I figured I might as well get that off my chest before I make the conscious decision to never see you again."

Kamila's frown deepened a little bit and she said, "You have three days to get packed and get out. If I see you on my property again after that, I will press charges for trespassing. Do I make myself clear?"

So she didn't even think of him as her son anymore, just an embarrassment, a nuisance. Then again, he hadn't thought of her as his mother for years, so he supposed it was only a matter of time. "I'll be gone in two, under one condition,” Dason said, and he tried in vain to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“And what would that be?” Kamila asked. He was giving back one of the days that she had given him. This was the least that she could do.

“Don’t tell Vale that I got kicked out,” he said. “I want her to think that I’m leaving of my own terms. I’m going to talk to her at the hospital, and I’ll get an apartment tomorrow.”

Kamila nodded and rose from her seat, saying only, “Deal” before turning and walking brusquely away. All Dason saw as she marched up the stairs was a businesswoman late for a meeting.

He went back to the hospital after that, and the sun was beginning to sink in the distance. The was less golden orange and more pale purple on the sterile white tile of Valentina’s hospital room.

Surprisingly, she was sitting up with a bandage wrapped around her head, and she greeted him with a smile. She was probably on a similar cocktail of painkillers as he had been, so she could at least afford reciprocate.

"Glad to see you're awake," Dason said as he made his way to a chair near her bed. "Hey," Valentina said as her smile turned weak, almost sad. "Guess they had you up and about a little quicker than me."

“The doctor said that the skin grafts were holding well on my neck, but that they couldn’t find any for my face. They’ve done what they can,” Dason said with a rueful laugh, “So I’m losing a bunch of my rugged good looks.”

"Not like you had that much to lose anyways," Valentina replied, and Dason gave her a playful, if halfhearted, slug to the shoulder in response.

Valentina bit her lower lip and glanced away.

"What's the matter?"

"Your face is messed up because of me. Mom said that you got burned going after the guy that hurt me. I’m sorry."

"It’s alright,” Dason said as he reached out and rested his hand on her shoulder. “Like you said, I didn’t have many good looks to lose.”

Valentina gave a small laugh at that, but at least it sounded genuine.

“Anyway,” Dason said, figuring that he might as well rip this bandaid off while there was still a bit of laughter in the air.

The room was silent save for the steady beep-beep-beep of Valentina’s EKG, and it was a little while before Valentina replied.

"Now?" Valentina said skeptically.

"I’m going apartment hunting tomorrow," Dason explained. In this moment, he knew that he could never tell her that Kamila had kicked him out, never to return under pain of jail time.

"You looking for a roomie?" Valentina asked.

"You can barely put up with my weird habits when we're living in the same house," Dason said with a chuckle that he hoped was convincing, "What makes you think you'll be able to tolerate them when we're even closer together."

Valentina winced, "You mean that thing that you can do with your food?"

"Among others," Dason confirmed.

Valentina bit her lower lip as she thought. When she spoke, Dason knew that she wasn't fooled.

"Need some space?"

Dason let out a resigned sigh.

"Yeah."

There was a bit of silence between the two of them that lasted more than a few heartbeats. The sun sank lower outside, and there were more purples than oranges on the white walls by the time that Valentina spoke again.

"Why was that one person after me?" Valentina asked. 

Dason hadn't thought about that. He had been so focused on the act of beating the other inkling to meaty chunks that he didn't think about the "why."

It was always about the "why" when it came to stuff like that.

Why would someone go after Vale? She'd never pissed off someone in her entire life, except maybe Kamila when she was caught up late eating Twinkies with an extra can of whipped cream.

Then again, it could be someone going after Kamila or Dason.

Kamila would make sense, if corporate executives were half as petty as TV made them out to be, which he knew they were not.

That left only him.

He might have pissed off a lot of people in the past couple of weeks, but none of them knew him well enough to target Valentina.

Except one.

Koi had done this.

Dason shook his head, brushing the thought away, but it came back stronger. Koi had seemed amicable when they had parted ways, but Dason knew that he wasn't just a thug. He was smart enough to cause trouble in the most effective way, so he would get exactly what he wanted.

"I don't know," Dason said, just as much to himself as to Valentina.

"Well... it's done and over with," she said with a sigh, then glanced up at him. "Can I look?"

"At?"

"Under the bandages. They should be safe to take off, right?"

"I suppose so," Dason said, and turned his head so she could get at them a little easier.

They stuck slightly as they pulled away, and Dason found that he was surprised that his vision hadn't been damaged in his right eye. He could see just as clearly as before, which he considered a blessing.

Valentina stared at him and nodded after a moment. "Well, it's not as bad as I thought. Worse than I wanted, but not as bad as I thought."

"I look fuck ugly, don't I?" Dason said with a low chuckle.

"I wouldn't go that far," Valentina said as she reached into a handbag hanging off one of the posts of the hospital bed and withdrew a small compact. She handed it to Dason, and he looked at himself in the small mirror.

"Well, that's a thing," Dason said blandly as he closed it and handed it back, "Shame the docs can’t do anything."

"Maybe they just need time to find the appropriate skin grafts," Valentina said with a shrug.

So he'd have to learn to live with it. Knowing him, he'd probably get used to it and turn down the skin grafts even if they did find a compatible match.

"I'll deal," Dason said. He wasn't exactly resigned, but he was determined to make the best of it that he could.

Valentina gave another weak smile and beckoned for him to come a little closer. Once he was close enough, she pulled him close and kissed his forehead, "I'll see you around?"

"Of course you will," he said with a smile, and even as he did that, he could feel how the changed skin moved in an unfamiliar way and realized that was something he'd have to get used to as well.

Kamila was gracious enough to let him sleep in his former home despite the ban that she’d levied against him, though she tapped her watch as if to say “You better move, otherwise I’m putting all your stuff on the lawn and burning it in forty-eight hours.”

So he went apartment hunting.

There were five decent apartment complexes within ten blocks of Kamila's house, and Dason settled on one that was within staggering distance to the deli that he and Valentina favored. The person that showed him the apartment wouldn't stop staring at the right side of his face, and he resolved to get something that would at least try and mitigate the stares. He'd rather have them staring at something he chose rather than something he couldn't get rid of.

He signed a lease for a year, and a rate that was much more reasonable than what he thought the two-bed apartment deserved. Perhaps they had pitied him.

After that, he took to packing. Most of his stuff was clothes, though he did have a few bits and bobs that he'd collected over the years from various sources. A fly encased in amber here, an old book written in the human tongue there.

The next day, he moved in, and the unpacking was done surprisingly quickly. He couldn’t really cook anything, so he ordered pizza, and stared down at the box that contained his purchase from Inkopolis Plaza.

He went into the bathroom after placing the pizza order, and set the box on the vanity just in front of the mirror.

Dason lifted the item out of its box and stared down at it. Just another thing he'd have to get used to.

He placed it onto his face and adjusted the straps on the back, making sure that it was tight and wouldn't come lose, but not that it was uncomfortable. 

His gaze lifted to the mirror in front of him.

A dead-eyed gas mask stared back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did warn you.


	6. Chapter 6

Buzz, buzz.

Dason's hand reached out from the mattress that he had on the floor (he really needed to get a bed frame or at least a box spring), and snagged his phone from where it was charging. The apartment was sparse, barely furnished, and quiet. There was the occasional barking of a dog from time to time, but that sounded distant and at least another building over.

 **Vale:** wtf bro  
**Vale:** why u wearin a mask  
**Vale:** u in the trenches  
**Vale:** fightin in the human's WWI  
**Vale:** it looks dumb

Of course. He'd been wearing the mask when he went to visit her in the hospital, and she'd been loopy because of her medication. It appeared that only now did the sight sink in properly.

 **Dason:** That's actually something I want to talk to you about.  
**Vale:** can we talk abt it @ ur place?  
**Dason:** I'd prefer we didn't.  
**Vale:** y  
**Dason:** I think that the inkling that did what they did to you knew that you were my sister and was attacking me through you.

It was a sobering thought, but one not without merit. It took a while for Valentina to respond.

 **Vale:** so wuts the plan  
**Dason:** We keep our distance for the time being, hide the fact that we're siblings.  
**Vale:** w8 wut  
**Vale:** first u move out n now this  
**Vale:** wtf is going on

He had to put himself in her shoes. It must have seemed like he was trying to push her away in a lot of ways, all because of Koi... or so he thought.

 **Dason:** We can still hang out.

It was a concession, and he knew it. But perhaps they would at least be able to come across as friends instead of siblings, though anyone with a sibling of their own would pick up on it right away.

Dason would have to kind of change the way he acted, the way he talked. Mainly, it would have to be less of each.

 **Vale:** their releasin me from the hospital today  
**Vale:** wanna get lunch 2gether?

Dason had to wince at that. With the gas mask, there was only one way that he actually could eat, and it was... unsettling to a lot of people.

But a squid has to do what a squid has to do.

 **Dason:** I think I can do that. Inkopolis Plaza? Crusty Sean's?

The deli was a little too familiar, a place where someone could put two and two together, especially if they sat in their usual place by the window. Crusty Sean's was basically a hub for inklings trying to get grub in Inkopolis Plaza, and it meant that two people meeting up and having a bite together would be seen as acquaintances, or even friends rather than siblings.

 **Vale:** oh fuck the hell yes  
**Vale:** im buyin tho  
**Vale:** u just paid 4 an apt  
**Dason:** I can live with that.

He forced himself out of bed and got into the shower. He couldn't take the water as hot as he would have normally liked because he was a little leery of heat, but he could at least freshen himself up and attempt to be presentable.

He bound his tentacles back behind his head and pulled the mask onto his face, staring at the blank expression in the mirror. This was who Dason was, now. He'd have to live with it.

Though there would need to be some changes.

Dason straightened up slightly, making it so his back wasn't necessarily rigid, but rather that it was straight instead of the slight stoop he had under normal circumstances. He pulled on his hoodie and stuffed his hands into his pockets. That much would stay the same, if not increase.

He looked like a completely different person, all things considered. The mask was the biggest factor in that, but he decided to change his tentacles to a deep forest green in order to complete the transformation.

Every little bit helped, after all.

As Dason started to make his way towards Inkopolis Plaza, he found that there were a couple of things that were at least a little bit better about his new digs.

First, he was closer to a bus stop than the old house had been, so he would be able to get to and from turf war faster... at least when the ban lifted.

Second, the people were much more neighborly to one another than they had been in the 'burbs. Of course, that wasn't necessarily a good or bad thing, all things considered. While someone may be a little more inclined to help their neighbor out, it also meant that they might be a little bit nosy when that wouldn't be appreciated.

Even so, there were a minimal number of people that had offered him so much as a "good morning."

Maybe the mask was already doing its job.

He boarded a bus and paid the fare in cash. It was a little crowded, and he didn't have anything that warranted him taking a seat when there was a little old ladyfish boarding on the next stop, so he stood and even went so far as to remove a hand from his pocket in order to grab one of the holds above him.

Strange how he was thinking about his changes in body language and attitude and making them more and more unconscious. Then again, that was how it had to be if he was going to make a new version of himself that couldn't be connected to Valentina.

He got off at the subway station, then took the train to Inkopolis Plaza. It was a long ride since the old homestead and the new apartment were closer to the outskirts of the city, but it gave Valentina a little bit of time to meet him.

Even so, she was there when he arrived, and waved at him with a weary smile.

Knowing how the doctor had treated him, she probably still had painkillers in her system.

"Hey there," she said as he approached. His body language probably came across as standoffish, if not outright hostile, so the fact that he was willing to hang with somebody that was clearly bubbly and happy and (more likely than not) on drugs, was odd.

"Hey," he said in response.

"Dude, I can barely understand you with that thing on. Take it off," Valentina said as she reached out for his mask.

Dason leaned out of reach of her and responded only with, "No."

Valentina frowned and unsteadily got to her feet. She still wore the bandage around her head, meaning that the stitches were probably still in place. She reached out to lean on him slightly and he stood there as a pillar for her to get her bearings.

"Let's get something to eat, then," Valentina said, "I'm fucking starving."

At least three squids looked at her with surprised expressions, one of them being a mother with two young children nearby. All of them wore scandalized expressions, and Dason had to resist the urge to laugh.

Valentina had always been a pottymouth, and now the painkillers had removed her filter... if there ever was one to begin with.

They got their food and sat down. Valentina stared at him as he sat there with his hands in his pockets and didn't move.

"Are you going to take that off to eat?" she asked.

"No."

"So you're going to have to-"

"Yes."

Valentina let out a sigh as she stared up at the umbrella over the table in exasperation. "Whyyyyyy. It's so creepy."

Dason shrugged in response even as he took a bite. He didn't have to move to do it. It just worked.

Of course, we could explain why this phenomenon works the way it does, but that would take a particularly long time and would require references to at least three papers that examine the fundamental laws of the universe, a particle accelerator, rediscovery of a forging technique that was lost in the fall of Damascus, a pair of rubber bands, seven philosophical treatises on the nature of consciousness and what makes "humanity," a liquid lunch, and a flatbed truck.

Additionally, several people have attempted to recreate the exact circumstances that began the chain of events leading to Dason being able to eat the way he does, and every single one of them has ended up very silly-looking, very dead, or very both.

In fact, the exact event that started this massive chain of universal causality leading to Dason's ability to eat things without touching them was only successfully completed by one person: an immortal named Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged who, upon hearing about the consequences of the actions that lead to his immortality, would likely take a break from his quest to insult every living being in the universe (in alphabetical order, mind) specifically for the purpose of defecating on this planet's sun.

As it is, though, the sun remains un-shitted-upon, and Dason continued to eat while wearing a gas mask and never taking his hands out of his pockets.

Valentina continued to find this distressing throughout the course of lunch, occasionally whining "Nooooo" and "You stop that" as if her words would have any effect on Dason's continued weirdness.

When they finished their meal (save for Dason's half-empty drink, but Valentina couldn't see him taking occasional sips from it), they were left with an uneasy silence.

"So. You're suspended from Turf War?" Valentina said, speaking slowly as if she was afraid to broach the subject. Admittedly, it was an uneasy thing for a lot of inklings to talk about, in part because nobody wanted to think about what could land someone in suspension or expulsion from the sport.

"Yup," Dason said. To tell the truth, he wasn't going to feel that comfortable talking about it either, but it was apparently the topic for discussion right now.

"So what are you going to do for money?" Valentina asked.

She had a point, he supposed. He did have a nest egg that would be able to sustain him for about three months, but he didn't have any plans after that ran out.

"Work somewhere. Dunno."

Valentina frowned. Was it because he wasn't really talking that much, or was it because his answer had been unsatisfactory?

"Well, maybe you should sort that out sooner rather than later. I doubt you have a year's worth of money just laying around."

Dason grunted in response, mainly because he was thinking the exact same thing, but also partially because she didn't have to point it out. He blamed the painkillers.

"Any ideas where you could start looking?" Valentina asked, poking a couple of crumbs around on her paper plate.

Dason looked past her towards the Turf War lobby, then shifted his gaze off to one side. A gaudy orange poster, like a traffic cone, proclaimed loudly **"NOW HIRING!"**

"I've got one," Dason said.

***

Dason's new boss... wasn't what he expected.

"Listen here, bub," came a grating voice through what was very likely a blown-out speaker. "Pay is dependent on performance. You don't perform, you don't get paid. Capisce?"

Dason was staring at a bear.

Well, it wasn't so much a bear as it was a radio in the vague shape of a bear. "Depends on what you need doing," Dason said in return.

"You mean you walked into here without having any idea what it was that we did?"

Dason had just seen the sign that read "GrizzCo" and walked in, knowing that it matched the name on the flyer. Hell, the flyer itself wasn't really that informative, mainly on account of it just saying **"Come on Down"** and **"Apply Today"** and **"Shifts available every day!"**

"It's not like your advertising was really clear," Dason replied.

"Basically, I'm going to shoot you out into salmonid-infested waters with the best protection I can provide you within reason, and you're going to collect their eggs for me."

Dason blinked. Admittedly, the bearadio probably couldn't see him doing that, unless they had more cameras around the place than Dason would have initially expected. From the outside it just looked like he wasn't moving.

"Well, a squid has to make a living," Dason said with a nonchalant shrug.

Now it was the radio's turn to be quiet. "Kid, how do you put on your pants in the morning?"

Dason's head tilted in mild confusion.

"What with those giant balls you have."

"It's not the balls I need to worry about, sir," Dason said, and the voice on the other end of the radio let out a laugh that probably only sounded like a cackle because of the speaker that it came through.

"Zapfish above," the radio said, "You're hired, man. I haven't met someone your kind of funny in a while. Name's Mr. Grizz. Welcome aboard. Go get changed into your uniform, and make sure you take the mask off."

"The mask stays," Dason said as he started to walk away.

"It's not regulation, kid."

"The mask. Stays," Dason said as he stopped and looked over his shoulder at Grizz.

"Alright, jeez. Which of us is the boss here?" Grizz said, and Dason could imagine someone raising their hands in surrender even as he spoke.

Dason changed into jumpsuit and galoshes, pulled on the thick rubber gloves, and strapped the helmet to his head in the next room, then joined a set of a couple dozen other squids that were all in similar gear.

They went up to a punch card machine and cranked it, receiving a card that supposedly indicated where they were supposed to go, and it wasn't long before Dason received his.

After that, it was simple: Get on the tug, go to the polluted wastes that formed salmonid territory, get weapons that Dason probably didn't know how to use (though he did occasionally get lucky and get his weapon of choice), and fight off the hordes.

It was hard work, tough on the body, and tougher on the mind. Most people didn't last within a week.

Dason did.

He lasted the first week, then the second, then the third, and he managed to climb the ladder all the way up to being one of Grizz's best profreshionals and skilled enough with almost all of the weapons that Grizz provided to take out any type of Salmonid no matter what he had in his hands. He could defeat a mothership without losing a single egg, and he was one of the people on the front lines during a glowfly attack when they weren't clustering on him.

Money came, and prestige. Grizz even forgave him that first day when he demanded that he keep his mask.

He got comfortable.

Which meant that something else would inevitably come along to send everything up into the air all over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And yes, that was a reference to Douglas Adams's series "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." If you ask nicely, I can provide a citation.


	7. Chapter 7

This was hell.

Some would say that war was hell, or that hell itself was hell, but the truth of the matter comes from an old human play called _No Exit._

Hell is other people.

Some people might agree with this given the circumstances that they have to deal with on a day to day basis. For example, if one has to put up with a screaming child on a bus or a plane and they have absolutely no room to quiet the brat down and the parents are uncaring at best or also yelling at worst. Another situation where hell could be other people is if you have accumulated a small amount of renown and one of the perhaps fifty people that have read even a portion of the body of your work sees you passing by on the street and is suddenly compelled to speak to you in the most high-pitched and strangely-accented voice possible.

Now, while the voice itself could be considered a nuisance, the biggest problem comes into play when the local polizia that you'd been trying to evade for the better part of six weeks spot you, causing you to punch the fan in the face simply to make a wall of people that crowd around them in order to tend to their wounds. Naturally, this means that the CCTV cameras on every street corner have captured your face, so you have to jump into the sewer and call the most clandestine plastic surgeon you know in order to make sure that you are able to get a new face before the week's out.

You know, a situation that everyone has been in.

However, a universal situation that shows you just how much hell is other people is when you have the distinct feeling that you're the only competent person at your job.

This was exactly how Dason felt regarding the shift he was currently working.

In order, his teammates were useless, a dumbass, and a nimrod.

Useless and the dumbass were siblings, with the useless one being the more intelligent of the bunch by a long shot. She held a Range Blaster in one hand and tried to stop her brother from staring down the barrel of his Aerospray to check if it was clean.

While it was plugged in.

And while his finger was on the trigger.

Dason wanted to throw himself into the polluted water already.

The nimrod, on the other hand, stood on the bow of the tug in a superhero pose, his fists planted on his hips and gazing out towards the horizon. Dason had seen a similar pose in a painting where the long-dead first leader of a long-dead nation was leading his soldiers across a river in the middle of the winter. Of course, by all accounts, he should have been huddling in the boat with the rest of his soldiers, so it was probably for the best that both the man and the country were long dead.

As if to drive the image home, the inkling on the bow took a deep breath and exhaled loud enough for everyone in a five-mile radius to hear. "You smell that?" he said as he looked over his shoulder at nobody in particular. The nimrod probably thought that he looked epic, like a hero out of a story.

He just looked stupid.

"What? The raw sewage floating on the water?" Dason said dryly behind his gas mask.

If Nimrod heard anything from Dason, he didn't respond to it. "It's the smell of adventure, everyone! It reminds me of the hunt!"

While Dason stared at him with a slack jaw and an expression of supreme bewilderment on his face, Nimrod let out a guffaw of epic proportions that sounded forced, strained, and more like it belonged in the mouth of an All-Mighty anime hero.

As if to drive that allegory home, Nimrod called out, "And you need not worry about the salmonids. It will be alright... because I am here!"

He pointed at himself with one thumb and grinned broadly. Dason had to resist the urge to push him into the water.

Dumbass stopped looking down the barrel of his aerospray and pointed it at Nimrod, prompting Useless to hiss "no!" and push it down towards the deck.

Alright, so Dumbass might not be that bad.

At least, Dason thought, This couldn't possibly get any worse.

Then, off in the distance, Dason saw their working rig. it was a small place, unfortunately, with not a lot of room to move about. To top it off, it wasn't one island. Instead, it was two islands that were separated by a rivulet of sewage that ran between them and a pair of platforms that could be moved to allow "easy" access between the pair.

This shift somehow just got worse.

Salmond Smokeyard was one of those places that every employee of Grizzco wishes they never had to go to, and crossed their fingers in hopes that they didn't draw the short straw. The only good time for that map was low tide, and even then it was just because it was only then that it finally grew to the size of a normal-ish map.

High tide was the worst. Especially with Flyfish, because they invariably spawned on the island across the way from the one that held the egg basket, and there was very little that one could do to go after them and have any form of success.

Dason had to physically bite his tongue. Otherwise, he would wind up unleashing a monstrous tirade of curses, damnations, and hollering that would not be appropriate for anyone to listen to if they were under the age of forty-five.

Hell, there was no guarantee that he wouldn't do it anyways.

"Alright, bait!" Grizz's voice came crackling through the speaker. "Load off!"

Dason obliged, even as Dumbass fumbled to figure out which button was the "super jump" button, completely ignoring Useless's attempts to explain and doing whatever the hell he wanted anyways.

He landed just next to the egg basket and looked over to see Nimrod preening with his Dapple Dualies in hand, looking around with a grin so wide and overbearing that if someone intelligent had been wearing it, it would have been incredibly creepy.

"Ah, this looks like a fine place for a battle," Nimrod said as Dason used his Squiffer to start inking out turf around him as best as he could before the round began. Useless and Dumbass still hadn't shown up. "Do you know what it reminds me of?"

Dason looked over at Nimrod to see that the squid hadn't taken Dason's lead and started inking their base so they had a place to fall back. There were only two possibilities for right answers here, and Dason was pretty sure that whichever one he chose, it would be the incorrect one.

"It reminds you of-" he said with a sigh.

"IT REMINDS ME OF THE HUNT!" Nimrod said with an obnoxious laugh just as Useless and Dumbass landed right next to them.

"Come on, Lennie," Useless said, clearly talking to Dumbass, "Just ink some turf for now."

"Ok, Georgina," Dumbass replied before he started laying down small bursts of ink in a staggered pattern, heading every which way but the ones that they were most likely to use.

Dason wanted to scream.

"Ready up, bait!" Grizz's voice came through the speakers. "We got incoming!"

Dason grumbled several things that are not appropriate to repeat in the pages of this chapter and began lining up his shots. One shot took down two chums and a cohock, a second took out a Steelhead that was getting ready to hock a loogey at Useless. Nimrod somehow managed to splat a Scrapper all by himself, though he didn't so much as pick up a single egg afterwards, instead moving on to hunt down more salmonids with laughter that might have been meant to be inspiring, but instead came across as moronic and patronizing.

Even as Dason collected the eggs from the Scrapper and Useless brought one from the Steelhead he'd splatted, he contemplated jumping into the ocean.

With a quota of thirteen eggs, they managed to get fourteen for the whole round. While it was better than Dason expected, more than anything else, he wanted to just dive into the water and stay there until the shift was over.

He all but chucked the squiffer right at Nimrod's face while Useless passed her range blaster over to him. He did a quick check on it, worried that its continued proximity to someone about as useful as a cock on a colander made it suffer the same affliction.

This truly was hell. It had a jam in it as it was passed over to him, and he had to flush the entire mechanism in order to get the clog out.

Just in time for the tide to rise.

"Fuck me," Dason said loud enough only for himself and Dumbass to hear.

Dumbass dangerously dangled a Dapple Dualie in Dason's direction and declared, "Georgina! He said a swear!"

By the great Zapfsih, what was Dumbass's problem? Was he six or something like that?

Useless ran over to push the weapon pointed at Dason down and said, "Remember what I said to you about pointing weapons at allies, Lennie?"

"Don't do it..." he said as he looked down sadly.

"That's right. Now let's get ready for the next wave."

Dason should have mentioned that since they were on the same team that their ink wouldn't be able to hurt one another, but he had a feeling that Dumbass would quickly test that statement out by shooting Dason on the spot.

He muttered more curses that sank into the very I-beams of the rig they stood on and likely endowed it with even further bad luck and mojo for everyone that followed after him for the next year or three.

The horn went off, summoning the Salmonids to do battle with the four inklings, and Dason began to fire off shots into the advancing waves while Nimrod went after an emerging Flyfish. Of course, Nimrod's throwing arm was about as impressive as his posing game.

Which was to say it probably looked a lot better in Nimrod's head than it did in practice.

Dason jumped onto the returning platform, shooting the fan on it twice and sailing across to throw one of his own bombs so at least one boss salmonid would go down today.

Unfortunately, that left him with very little ink to hold off the incoming horde even as Useless and Dumbass were splatted across the way.

Well, at least this shift would be over soon.

However, it seemed that The Great Zapfish would deny Dason even that one mercy as Nimrod used his splashdown right behind him. To his credit, the timing was good. Two Steelheads were getting ready to launch their payload and the splashdown managed to splat them both, causing a chain reaction that cleared the platform and bought Dason enough time to throw a bomb right into the Flyfish's open hatch.

"What a riveting battle!" Nimrod called out with a burst of laughter, "It-"

"Reminds you of the hunt! I know! Grab the fucking eggs!" Dason said. He'd had about enough of this guy.

They each grabbed one egg and started towards the moving platforms, only for Nimrod to jump on one and take off with it, leaving Dason stranded. 

"You. Have. Got. To. Be. Shit. Ting. Me!" he said, punctuating each syllable with a blast of his weapon as he drove back a small horde of Smallfries.

He heard the sound of a splashdown going off again as Nimrod brought Useless and Dumbass back from the grave. To her credit, Useless was at least trying to push them back, but a Steel Eel got her caught in a vortex and splatted her not fifteen seconds after. Dumbass lived up to his name by not shooting the correct part of the eel, which was to say everything except for the tail.

"Get the tail, Dumbass!" Dason said as he started to draw the Steel Eel out of its coil.

"Okay," Dumbass replied as he shot the pilot of the Steel Eel and splatted them. At least that worked.

"Now revive your sister! Fuck's sake, do I need to walk you through everything?!"

"Help!" Useless called just as Dason spoke.

"Okay," Dumbass replied again as he threw a couple of shots at Useless's life preserver to bring her back.

"I am here!" Nimrod called out as he used his final splashdown and blew up another Steelhead and a Scrapper. Dason began to wonder if the guy even realized that he held the perfect weapon for taking out Steelheads, or if he just thought he had unlimited Splashdowns. 

Either way, he was an absolute fool.

There were thirty seconds left on the clock and they only had four out of sixteen eggs.

Dason was almost tempted to just let the round die.

But, he had his pride, which is a damn terrible thing to have in the vast majority of circumstances. He dove into the ink and fired off blasts that pushed the salmonids at the very least and splatted them at best, grabbing one egg after the other and dunking them into the egg basket.

Useless proved to not live up to her name by grabbing a few more and dunking them as well while Dumbass and Nimrod handled crowd control.

This was a Squidsmas miracle if Dason ever saw one. Everyone was actually working together. Maybe the could-

After the sixteenth egg was dunked, Dason was splatted by a fucking Flyfish on the other side of the rig.

Dumbass fell not long after that, then Nimrod. All three of the splatted team congregated around the egg basket, and Dason tried an attempt at telepathy.

"Come on," he thought as hard as he could in Useless's direction. "Throw a bomb. Save all of us at once and we'll be able to win this wave."

He wasn't entirely sure if he wanted to, at this point. The whole experience was making him quite miserable and borderline nauseated.

She brought her arm back and a bomb filled up in her hand.

"Yes!" Dason thought. "Yes! Throw it! We can still do this!"

She did.

It coasted right past the congregated group and into the murky, sewage-infested waters in the distance. 

"Congratulations," Dason thought just as she was splatted by the salmonids that washed over her. "You have more than earned your name."

"Team wipe, huh?" Grizz said as his employee pulled them all back to the tug and reconstituted them into their squid forms. "Sucks to suck. At least you got me some eggs."

Dason ground his beak and had to force himself to look away from the other three shift members while a female automated voice read off their statistics in his head. He had dunked the most golden eggs, of course, and Nimrod had gotten only slightly more Power Eggs than Dason because he'd used up all of his splashdowns in that second wave. It didn't come as any surprise at all that Dumbass hadn't scored a single golden egg, not that Dason cared.

"Thirty-four points earned towards next bonus. Superbonus - Cash earned," the voice said in his ear.

That made Dason sit up. That extra cutter in his pocket would go a long way towards next month's rent, and he was more than happy to cut his losses after that disastrous match. 

Of course, that wasn't to say that he wouldn't treat himself to a little bit of comfort food.

He was feeling... pizza.

Pizza would be a good option.

At least he would get away from hell that way.

The boat docked, and Dason changed in the locker room with an air of frustration about him.

"I don't want to do this anymore, Georgina," Dumbass said once they left.

"But it's good money," Useless replied with a whine. "We'll be able to get a nicer place like this!"

"I don't want to do this anymore. People yell at me and the work is too hard."

"Come on, Lennie!"

"I don't want to. I like working at the library."

So Dumbass was a librarian? That was odd. Dason kept walking.

"Come on! It was one bad shift!" Useless protested.

"One bad shift means more bad shifts. I'm going home."

"Lennie!" Useless protested, but Dason didn't look back. This wasn't unusual, people throwing down their overalls and walking away, metaphorically speaking. People that couldn't handle the job were better off without it.

He had pizza to eat.


	8. Chapter 8

Dason didn't really know how he felt about the weapons for this shift.

He held the H-3 Nozzlenose in his hands and had a severe temptation to wipe his hands on his coveralls and call it a day, but he was close to getting a super-bonus in cold, hard cash.

That extra twenty k would get him closer to being able to make an advance payment on next month's rent, meaning that he would have some money for groceries.

He internally sighed at the fact that he was actually acting like a normal adult for a change instead of the kid that he had been less than a month ago.

"Alright, bait," Mr. Grizz's voice came through the grimy speakers on the tugboat, as well as through the earpieces on their helmets, "It's the Spawning Grounds, so you have to keep an eye on the horizon instead of on the ground. Bring me those golden eggs, get paid, and don't die. Grizz, out."

The feed cut off and Dason was left to take in the sight of the rest of the work crew.

Two of them were clearly friends, if not brothers, and were in the process of trying to pump each other up through obnoxiousness and roaring. One of them had tentacles tipped in red, the other in yellow. The third member of the group was a girl, and... were those rounded ears?

Inkling ears always came to a point, like little doritos sticking out the sides of their heads, but this girl's ears were rounded off slightly, and her tentacles seemed to be thicker than the average inkling's under her helmet.

She was an octoling.

Dason had known that there were several octolings that had already come up to the surface over the years, but this was the first time that he'd had to fight alongside one of them.

Dason wouldn't give her guff as long as she was good at the job. But based on the thousand-yard stare that she wore on her face, she would be a wild card at best and a liability at worst.

So he was teamed up with Moron A, Moron B, and the Wild Card.

"Let's goooooo!" said Stupid in Stereo, and they launched themsevles with one holding a hydra splatling and the other wielding a Luna Blaster.

Dason could feel the burgeoning headache already.

The octoling girl with him lifted the sploosh-o-matic in her hands and grimly launched herself out to the Spawning Grounds and Dason followed not long after.

Already, he could tell that Stupid in Stereo were going to be a liability, as they stomped their feet and chanted as if they were doing cadences in a military boot camp.

Dason was solemnly reminded some rules that a guy named Murphy laid down a long time ago:

_"No combat-ready unit has ever passed inspection."_

_"No inspection-ready unit has ever passed combat."_

These guys were inspection-ready, that much was for certain.

The battle horn sounded, and Dason started to move forward, the unwanted extra kick from the Uglynose in his hands making him grimace. Truly such a clumsy and random weapon.

Even so, he was able to ride the recoil well enough to drop rank upon rank of chums that came out of the water, even as the octo with the sploosh charged forward and controlled the crowd better than he ever could.

He heard the snorting inhale of a Steelhead and turned as Stupid in Stereo hollered "SIE SIND DAS ESSEN UND WIR SIND DIE JAGER!" and opened up a volley of pain on the Steelhead, a few lucky shots managing to splat it before it launched its payload.

"Blind, stupid, simple, doo-dah, clueless luck," Dason muttered to himself as he grabbed eggs and began to make his way back to the basket, dunking them in and continuing to clear as much of the crowd as he could.

He and the octo seemed to work really well together, though. She knew how to keep the crowd under control, and was able to take out the more high-value targets when she was right next to them, which pretty much led to a free egg, if not all three.

They were ten eggs over quota when both morons got splatted and began hollering for help as if they'd been downed for a good thirty seconds instead of two.

"I am girt by idiots," Dason muttered as he charged towards them and lobbed a bomb that would have been able to get both of them back in the game, then paused as he considered the fact that he had actually just used the word "Girt."

A tracker showed up under his feet and he felt the ground began to shift.

"Fuck" was all he said as he tried to push away and fell back as the Maws erupted out of the ground.

She was a big one, and Dason went up into the air, his feet flailing to keep him aloft before the Maws snapped her jaws shut. He didn't want to get vored. Not today. Not again.

A splat bomb coasted right into her mouth and she snapped down on that instead, only to explode from the inside out, just as surely as if a hard-boiled sheriff on the high seas had said "Smile you son of a-" and then shot the bomb instead of just letting it blow.

Dason landed on the ground hard, rubbing his rear as the wave ended, and he looked up at the octoling that had thrown the bomb.

"Thanks," he said. It was the very least that he could offer someone that had just saved him from the possibility that he would wind up being the world's weirdest Lunchable.

The octoling just nodded and returned to base, and Dason jumped back as well. The next round, Dason had the Hydra Splatling while she was landed with the Uglynose. Stupid in Stereo was about as useful as a cock on a colander for all the eggs they collected that round... and, hell, the final one, too. They were good for pushing the enemy back, especially when Moron A got the sploosh and Moron B got the Uglynose.

That meant that Dason and the octoling could just run eggs back and forth as quickly as possible, putting them at a pretty solid total of seventy-three for the shift.

"Well slather me in butter and call me a biscuit," Grizz said, sounding impressed. "You lot really are profreshionals. Well done. I'll have something extra waiting for you when you decide to pick up your checks."

Dason nodded and pumped his fist while Stupid in Stereo chest bumped one another and super-jumped back to the tug.

The octoling, however, simply grimaced and returned herself.

That made Dason curious. Who wouldnt' be excited about a bit of extra cheddar from Grizz? Certainly not him.

Dason jumped back as well and the Tug started to make its way back to Inkopolis Harbor, passing by a couple of other tugs with Grizzco branding on them. You think that if Grizz could afford to pay his people as well as he did and own a small fleet of tugboats besides, he would be able to get them working well enough to make sure that they moved a little faster or didn't belch smoke on every other chug of the engine.

Guess there were some benefits to wearing a gas mask, after all.

The ship docked and everyone went to their respective locker rooms to get changed back into the clothes that they had worn to the shift and submit their Grizzco uniforms for decontamination. A short shower later, Dason stepped out to pick up his super bonus. On top of the chunk tokens that he had earned earlier in the day, plus the drink tickets for Crusty Sean's, there was a nice, fat stack of bills in the large envelope that Dason received.

Fuck the hell yes.

He turned around and saw the octoling girl from before, tentacles orange with purple tips with a camo cap on her head. She leaned solemnly against the wall and stared at her phone, her expression bland, bordering on grim.

Dason considered, briefly, talking to her for a moment and thanking her again, but brushed it off.

There were so many people that came through Grizzco as part-timers, he'd likely never see her again.

Dason shrugged off his lack of friends and walked into the plaza so he could get a bite to eat.

Daddy was going to get himself a steak dinner tonight.

***

The next day, more shifts were posted on the Grizzco website, and Dason made his way to the HQ so he could sign up.

Sure enough, there were dozens of inklings that were there, trying to get a piece of the action, though when some of them saw the weapons, they just up and walked away.

The weapons for the day were the Aerospray MG, Kelp Splatterscope, Splattershot Pro, and Tri-slosher. A well-balanced group, all things considered, but a bit short on average range.

Still. Dason needed the money, especially considering some high-grade gear might be in the cards for him from today's super-bonuses. Combo that with the chunks that he could get for Murch's shop, he could probably make a killing selling those secondhand.

It wasn't exactly legal, mind, but Koi had at least given Dason an in with the right kinds of wrong people, and they had kept their relationship good even after the one with Koi had gone fuckways.

Besides, he already had all the chunks he needed to get his main set of gear exactly where he wanted it to be.

Dason got his assignment from the shift card machine, and nodded as he got Marooner's Bay. It was a good map, all around, but a little difficult to navigate in certain areas because of the altitude and how some of the walls didn't seem to take ink at all.

Depending on the weapons, he'd either be in the shit, or he'd be serving support.

He started out with the Tri-slosher and immediately looked for the Aerospray as to provide fire support, only to find the octoling girl from yesterday, still with that face set in grim determination and her expression as vacant as a random motel in the dead center of Nebraska.

"Hey," he said as he approached, "Thanks again for the save, yesterday."

The octoling girl looked at him with an expression that could have been borderline haggard if it weren't for the fact that determination blazed in her eyes.

She didn't say anything. She just nodded as the first horn blared and the salmonids came running.

Dason moved forward with her, watching back and sides as she kept pushing forward. Their teammates turned out to be fairly competent, working in tandem to drop a flyfish, then a scrapper before starting to run eggs back to the basket. Dason wasn't a particularly steady hand with the tri-slosher, but he at least had some experience with it, and the octoling girl handled the Aerospray with ruthless efficiency.

They cleared the first round with a dozen eggs more than quota, and it seemed a promising start. Dason was saddled with the Kelp Splatterscope for the second round while the octoling girl was set with the Splattershot Pro, and he thought that they would be alright.

They proved to be, with Dason leading his targets well enough that he was able to splat a few Steelheads, as well as a couple of those Mary Poppins looking motherfuckers that somehow managed to be almost as annoying as the Flyfish.

And Dason _hated_ Flyfish.

They managed to kill the second round with relative ease, scoring an extra twenty eggs over quota, putting them at almost sixty altogether.

Dason thought that things were going pretty alright, all things considered, that this was relatively smooth sailing, and that he'd be able to get a pretty solid bonus after the first shift alone.

Then the world seemed to darken as clouds rushed in from all sides to blot out the sun and cover the area in shadow. Dason heard Klaxons going off.

"Mothership!" Grizz called, "Mothership, you motherless sons of kelp! Stop them from getting my fucking eggs!"

The Chinooks started to shoot out of the Mothership, carrying the crates down to ground, and Dason let out an internal sigh of frustration at the fact that he had put so much faith in the two random teammates he'd been saddled with.

Dason stared down at his hands and muttered to himself, "You've got to be shitting me..." before he dove into the fray. His Aerospray would do absolutely nothing with regards to range, so he was on crowd control, and his two teammates didn't even bother trying to stop the Chinooks and just focused on the boxes they dropped.

While killing the coolers was good for keeping the Salmonid population down on the map, it did absolutely nothing for golden eggs.

Dason saw a Chinook drop down in front of him, and he opened fire just as it dropped its cooler. The cooler popped, but the Chinook started to fly away, perhaps emboldened by the steady stream of curse words coming from behind Dason's mask as he angrily shook his fist at it.

There was a crack of a charger, the Chinook exploded, and an egg dropped right in front of him. There was another crack of a charger, and another fell not too far away.

The octoling girl was standing on the platform with her charger, clipping the Chinooks right out of the air with a steady hand and a mouth set in a grim, determined line.

"Get the eggs!" Dason called to the other teammates, who were still trying to manage the tide of Chums and Cohocks that were starting to pop up. "This way!"

They got the message and managed to bag six eggs before another message came from Grizz.

"She's moving in! Keep her off my damn egg basket!"

Dason checked his special. He had Bomb Rush, one of which he had used in the earlier rounds, but that would do no good against the mothership until it was close enough to start doing damage to their egg count.

Which meant that one of the others had the Stingray.

Fuck.

He started to call out what they needed to do, only to see the octoling pull out the Stingray and let out a wordless grunt as she rode the recoil and blasted the Mothership back to where it would be out of range.

Dason watched with his mouth hanging open in surprise.

She really _was_ more competent than he thought.

They went back to it and began cleaning up the area once the mothership started firing off Chinooks again, and it was a relatively quick job. The mothership came in once more, and the octoling managed to push it back with the same grim determination that she had before.

However, as they got down to the thirty-second mark, Dason began to notice a problem.

They'd been so focused on the eggs that the coolers full of salmonids had been stacking up, and more and more salmonids managed to swarm across the map.

The two teammates that hadn't known to shoot the Chinooks out of the air got splatted, one right after the other, just as Dason picked up the final golden egg. Grizz was hollering in his ear about how he had only ten seconds left, just as he began to make his way back towards the egg basket.

The whole span in front of him was covered with the green gunk that the Salmonids managed to trail everywhere, and he was out of ink. Going under to refuel would cost them the round.

Dason swore, then looked over at the octoling girl that was standing right next to the egg basket with her charger. She saw him, saw how he was stuck and more salmonids were coming in behind, then dropped into a firing stance.  
She pressed the scope up to her eye, took a split second to line up the shot, and fired.

She was splatted by a mess of smallfries and a chum that had come in to flank her a moment later.

Dason spared only a moment's thought of "thank you" as he dove into the ink and managed to slam the last egg in the basket a hair before the timer went off.

The salmonids retreated, the clouds cleared, the sky brightened, and Dason let out a sigh of relief.

Down next to him, the octoling girl's life preserver sat patiently, and he fired a quick burst from his Aerospray to revive her.

She stood there, staring at him, and nodded slowly as if in approval, though he could tell that her gaze was still wary if not outright suspicious.

"Thanks again," Dason said just before they both jumped back to the tug.

Turns out Grizz was impressed with Dason's performance and slipped him a little extra cheddar in the bonus, and he walked away with the envelope stuffed in his pocket while the octoling girl behind him stepped up to the pay desk to recieve her wages.

"Eh..." the eel behind the counter said, "Grizz sez ya's didn' get 'nuff eggs 'n th'last round. Yer gettin' a pay cut t'day."

Dason's brow furrowed. That didn't make sense. She had been using a charger. Everyone with a lick of sense knows that a charger stays in the back and provides support.

Something sketchy was going on here. Just as Dason stepped forward to say something, the octoling stuffed the pay envelope in her pocket and walked away wordlessly, even if she did kick the support of a bench in what Dason could only assume was frustration as she did so.

He caught up to her and said, "Hey, hold on."

She paused, turned to look at him. Well, more accurately, she might have been looking at his collarbone. The brim of her hat was pulled so low that she would have had to turn her head up to meet his face in order to see her eyes.

At least he had her attention.

"You saved my bacon yesterday, and you saved the whole shift today," he said.

She said nothing in response.

"And I heard what the eel said."

That made her tense up, and he could tell that she was getting ready to walk away.

"We wouldn't have finished that shift successfully if it wasn't for you, and what Grizz did to rip you off is shady as hell, so I'd like to try and make it up to you."

She didn't move, save for the barest tilt of her head as if to ask a question.

"Want to grab some lunch? My treat."

The octoling straightened up and finally looked him in the eyes. She looked... tired. That was the best way to describe it. Like someone that had been working minimum wage for forty hours already, and the week wasn't even half-over.

But the fact that she was willing to meet his gaze gave him enough of a reason to think that she was willing to accept.

"I know a good pizza joint down the way," Dason said, and he started to walk.

Admittedly, it did make him happy that she fell in step alongside him.


	9. Chapter 9

Dason sat across from the Octoling girl at Spicy Jack's Pizza, with the clear plastic table seemingly situated atop a massive steering wheel, not unlike the kind that you would see on a Spanish Galleon in the 1700s.

As a general rule, pizza and pirates don't go really well together. In fact, they tend to go as well together as orange juice and toothpaste, or genitals and Tiger Balm. Which is to say **_OH GOD WHY WOULD YOU WILLINGLY DO THAT IF YOU DON'T KNOW BETTER._ **

But Spicy Jack's was alright, especially since his clientele was biologically predispositioned to a pescatarian diet (which, strangely enough, made the pirate theme fit somewhat better), though Dason had preferred the traditional types of 'za whenever he'd visited. The owner himself was a pufferfish with one eye and a nose for good food, looking well-fed even before he inevitably went "phoomph."

The octoling girl had taken off her hat when she sat down and carefully placed it in her lap. Dason had not, of course, removed his gas mask, prompting a suspicious look from her on the matter.

Their waitress, an urchin in true pirate attire (which is to say not "skimpy tavern wench" clothing), placed a glass of cola in front of the octoling and a cup of iced tea in front of Dason.

The girl just stared at him.

It was kind of unnerving, all things considered, but Dason didn't really know how to talk to girls aside from his sister, and if he talked to this girl the same way that he talked to Valentina, she'd probably punch him square in the jaw.

Not to say that Vale didn't at least smack him upside the head time to time, but that was just how siblings were on occasion.

So he stared right back. He kept his hands in his pockets, didn't really move, even to the point where he kept his breathing slow enough to make it seem like he wasn't breathing at all.

This was all in an attempt to make him seem less threatening.

He failed miserably.

She stared at him through wary eyes, not exactly hostile, but definitely suspicious, and the dark circles under her eyes weren't much better.

The waitress came back over to their table with a notepad and a cheerful smile. "Alrighty then," she said in a voice that seemed way too deep for her slim frame, "Have we decided what we want?"

Dason hadn't even looked at the menu. He was too busy locked in the staredown with the girl that, for a second, he'd completely forgotten that he'd asked the girl out to lunch instead of to an interrogation.

Dason asked, "You picky?"

She shook her head, never taking her eyes off Dason the entire time.

In return he flipped open to the "Captain's Pick" section of the menu and said, "Large Sailor Jerry, well-done crust, please and thank you."

The waitress nodded and glided off. She was tall enough that too much bounce in her step would make sure that one of the spines on her head got stuck in one of the ceiling beams, so she had to be careful.

Which left Dason with the octoling girl again.

He took a sip of his tea. She didn't notice the half-inch of liquid mysteriously vanishing from the glass, which was definitely a plus. Though it did make him worry about what would happen if she saw him eating... well, the way he did.

"I'm Dason, by the way," he said, and contemplated reaching out to shake her hand. He didn't, though, and instead waved. He nervously took another sip of his tea.

The octoling stared at him for a moment and reached into her pocket for a pen, taking one of the napkins and jotting down something in quick, angular script.

She held up the napkin and showed him the name scribed on it. Her handwriting was small enough that he had to lean across the table to get a good look at it, almost jagged, and looked like it was italicized even though she hadn't written it in a word processor.

"Oriole."

Dason looked at the napkin, then back to her. "Your name is Oriole?"

She nodded and put the napkin down, keeping the pen out in case she needed to write more.

Dason knew that was a type of bird, but didn't comment on it. She'd probably heard every joke in the book regarding the name.

Even so, he couldn't suppress the sound of an old song welling up in his head that would take him literal hours to erase.

Damn earworms.

He nodded slowly and asked, "So... do you like working for Grizzco?"

Oriole's gaze hardened and she shook her head.

Right. Avoiding that subject.

"You're from Octo Valley, right?" he asked. This might be a touchier subject, but he wanted to at least put it out there because pursuing the one thing that they had in common was likely to get her to walk away.

Oriole stared at him again, her gaze a little softer, this time, and she shook her head.

Curiouser and curiouser. An octoling that was born in Inkopolis? And so long ago that it couldn't have possibly been the Squid Sisters' performance in Octo Valley that prompted her parents to come to the surface. Now _that_ was something that warranted at least a bit of discussion.

As if she could see the gears turning in his head, her gaze hardened again. Clearly, they weren't going down that route.

Fortunately, their pizza arrived. It was a white pie with what looked like clams on top and... slices of grilled lemon?

Dason stared at the pizza as if betrayed. Spicy Jack was a right bastard for doing this sort of thing. He was a terrible person, a monster, a cruel and evil thing that needed to die screaming.

Dason moved a slice onto his plate and took a bite.

Oh.

Okay.

That actually wasn't too bad, all things considered.

Maybe Spicy Jack could be redeemed after all.

Dason looked up from the slice on his plate over at Oriole, who sat there with an expression of shock on her face and a slice of pizza halfway to her mouth.

Only then did she finally speak for the first time since Dason had met her, and even then, it was barely more than a mutter. "What the fuck?"

Dason was almost as shocked as she was. "So you actually can talk?"

"What the fuck was that?" Oriole said, gesturing at the slice of pizza that had a very obvious bite taken out of it.

"It's how I eat," Dason said as nonchalantly as he could.

This did not help.

"That is _not_ eating," Oriole said. She'd regained most of her composure, but she was still a little weirded out.

"Well, what would you rather I do?" Dason said in mild exasperation, "Just absorb it through my skin like an amoeba?"

"You could take the mask off!" Oriole protested, then paused. "Wait. You can do that?"

"No, but my sister can," Dason said. He left it up to her to determine whether that was a lie or the truth.

"And you can't just take off the mask because..." she said.

Dason fell silent and his gaze shifted over to Oriole, and he hoped that even through the gas mask, she would see that he was unwilling to answer that question.

Oriole's gaze broke away from his first, and she murmured, "Okay," before she took a timid bite of the pizza.

That broke the floodgates. She devoured the rest of the slice with such voracity that Dason was tempted to say, "I've seen eating. That wasn't eating. That was carnage."

Then again, when it came to eating weird, he had no room to talk.

Oriole glanced at him, then tentatively reached for another slice. Dason nodded, and she ate the second one much more slowly than the first.

"I'm guessing you don't get to eat good food much," Dason said before he took another bite of his own slice.

Oriole shook her head, then swallowed before answering, "If I eat at all, it's usually Crusty Sean's."

Dason winced at the notion of that. While Crusty Sean's food was good, it wasn't something that you could base an entire diet around. Mainly because most diets demanded that you exclude deep-fried whatevers, but also because Dason was pretty sure that Crusty Sean removed all nutritional value from the food in favor of an additional injection of delicious.

No wonder she was already on her third slice.

"Well, if there are any leftovers," Dason said as he took another bite of his own slice, "You can take them with you."

Oriole narrowed her eyes, and Dason held up his hands to forestall the inevitable judgement. "I have groceries. Please."

Oriole took another cautious bite of her slice, as if quick movements would cause it to bite her instead of the other way around. "You sure?"

"Yup," Dason said as he leaned back in his seat and finished off his iced tea. Oriole stared at the glass uncomfortably, even as the clueless waitress came by and refilled both of their drinks.

They ate in companionable silence for a bit, even though Oriole seemed distinctly uncomfortable every time Dason took a bite of his food, until he asked, "So why don't you like Grizzco? Yeah, the work can be scary sometimes, but the pay is good."

Oriole stared at him with a baleful gaze, and Dason had to resist the urge to flinch.

"The pay's not good," Oriole muttered before she took another bite of pizza.

Dason arched an eyebrow. It couldn't be seen behind his mask, but he was sure the sense of incredulity was there.

Apparently it was, because Oriole let out a sigh and continued. "Grizz is a racist. He doesn't give me the same pay as everyone else because I'm an octoling. He claims that I 'don't attract salmonids as well as the others.' Fucking asshole."

She said the last with enough quiet venom in her voice to make Dason's skin crawl.

"So, uh..." Dason said, trying not to sound nervous, "Why keep working for him?"

"He may be bad, but others are worse," Oriole explained. "Grizz doesn't hide his disdain for me, but at least he's willing to talk to me. Most of the people that run businesses in Inkopolis still hate octolings, despite everything."

Dason frowned and folded his hands on the table. "What about Turf War?" he asked. They didn't discriminate, as far as he knew. He'd seen a couple of octolings on the splatterfield already.

"I'm waiting for my application to go through. Apparently it's hitting a lot of snags, because my caseworker got a promotion and now they have a lot more duties. They can't spare time for a little old octoling like me," Oriole said, and her voice grew bordering on hateful by the end.

"Who's your caseworker?" Dason asked, just out of curiosity.

"Kamila something. Can't remember her last name," Oriole replied.

Dason had to resist the urge to bark out a derisive laugh. Of course it would be her. "Oh, I know her," he chose to say instead, "She's a fucking bitch."

"Thank you!" Oriole said as she threw her hands up in exasperation, "I could have been on the splatterfield a week ago if it weren't for 'Oh I had meetings all day today' and 'sorry I was out of town on business.' You'd think that they could at least reassign my case."

"Buuuuut they don't," Dason said, "That's how the Turf War Authority works. It's a bigger and more complex bureaucracy than the government around here." Dason sometimes thought that the two might be intertwined.

Oriole stared at him for a moment, as if wondering about his response, then her gaze shifted away for a moment.

"You're probably the first person I've actually talked to in a couple of weeks. Like not through email or anything," she said.

Dason winced underneath his mask, and was glad that the expression didn't show on his face. That had to have been rough. No wonder she looked so out of it when he'd asked her to lunch, and there was even less of a wonder at how it took so long for her to actually speak.

"I've enjoyed hanging out with you so far, though," Dason said. That much was true. Mainly because a lot of the people that worked for Grizz were either annoying, incompetent, or a terrifying combination of both.

At the very least, Oriole seemed a little introverted, maybe on account of people still having an irrational fear of octolings. Across from him, she bit her lower lip and glanced away.

"I'm glad to finally talk to someone," she said in return. "I can't tell behind that mask, but I don't think that you're afraid of me just because I'm an octoling."

"I'm not afraid of you because you're an octoling," Dason agreed, but the wary look in her eyes prompted him to continue. "I'm afraid of you because of how well you handle that Stingray. Not a lot of people know to whip it out when the mothership gets close."

Oriole stared at him and blinked a few times before she let out a chuckle that might have grown into a laugh if Oriole hadn't controlled herself. 

Dason was smiling behind his mask, and he had a feeling that Oriole knew that as well. His burns still itched when he smiled, but that was something he could live with in due time.

"Would you like to work some shifts together tomorrow? Pool our earnings and split them even?" Dason asked. It wasn't fair that she was getting ripped off by Grizz when he practically seemed to throw bonuses at Dason.

Oriole narrowed her eyes at him. "Why?"

"Because Grizz pays me well and he pays you shittily. I have enough of a nest egg that I can live comfortably, so I'm ok with taking a cut in pay," Dason said with a shrug. "Besides, based on how you ate half of the pizza already, you could do with more good food in your life."

Oriole frowned. "I'm not a charity case. I can look after myself," she said.

Dason should have seen that coming. He let out a sigh and said, "Alright. Do you at least want to work together so you don't get stuck on a team with too many muppets?"

That made Oriole cock her head in confusion. In that moment, she did look very birdlike. "Muppets? Jeez, I guess Grizz really will hire anybody."

Dason realized the source of the confusion and raised his hands to forestall any further judgement. "No, no. I mean morons. Idiots. Stupid people."

More confusion, "How are muppets stupid?"

"I don't know. Just a phrase my dad used to say," Dason replied even as he slumped. "Still. Meet outside Grizzco at nine tomorrow? Get it done early?"

Oriole thought on that for a moment, then nodded in agreement, "I'd like that."

The next time their server came by, Dason asked for the check and paid for it despite the sullen look on her face.

"It's not charity," Dason said, forestalling her argument, "I said it would be my treat at the start. And I also said you could take the leftovers with you."

Oriole looked at the two uneaten slices of pizza that remained of the original eight, and angrily tucked them into the to-go box. "You're a jerk."

Dason couldn't help but laugh at that. For a moment, she reminded him of Valentina, and in the best way possible. "I know," he responded.

She muttered something under her breath about, "damn decent people" and "stupid rich inklings" but he could tell her heart wasn't in it.

Mainly because she was trying to hide her smile.

Dason would call that a win.


	10. Chapter 10

"On your left!" came the voice at Dason's side, and a quick burst from the Splattershot Jr. in Oriole's hands took out a chum that would have been a whole mess of trouble if he hadn't noticed it.

"Thanks!" he called before he dived back towards the egg basket and started to use the E-liter he'd been assigned to keep the tide back. Truth be told, he hated the weapon with a passion. Slow to charge, difficult to use. The only time it was of a modicum of use in any situation was if there was a chokepoint or a **very specific target** that he needed to snipe.

Fortunately, the Lost Outpost made sure that there were only three places that he needed to keep an eye on, which meant that the only thing that he had to worry about were Maws.

He'd learned his lesson about them, at the very least.

"On the right!" Dason called, and Oriole was the first to respond, diving into the line of ink he'd laid down in order to open fire on a Mary-Poppins motherfucker.

If it were Dason, he might have hollered "GET SOME!!"

But, to Oriole's credit, she only grunted as she rode the recoil of her weapon and picked up one of the eggs it dropped.

"Come on!" he hollered as he opened fire on a Steelhead and splatted not only it but the four cohocks that were surrounding it.

There were a mess of eggs on the ground, and, to their credit, his team was working as best as they could in order to bring them in. They were sitting at twenty seven out of thirteen eggs, and there were thirty seconds left in the round. At the very least, they were going to make big bank at the end of this round if they-

Oh.

Oh no.

Dason looked down at his feet and saw the telltale shadows of a Flyfish strike.

His whole team was up. Why in the almighty taintchafing fuck was he the only one targeted?!

He dove into the quick line of ink that he could lay down, but got splatted as the first missiles came down.

A girl with the L3 he treasured got splatted not a second after, and her friend with a Splatling Deco.

Oriole was the last one up, but she was out on one of the docks, having gone that way in order to take out a particularly annoying Stinger, but couldn't make her way back without having to fire back through bordering on two dozen salmonids.

She got splatted, though Dason didn't know if there was anyone that could have made it through that mess without a Dynamo Roller.

The shift got called, and Grizz chided them.

"Come the fuck on, Dason! I know you're working with an octo, but you're better than this! I've seen you carry the entire fucking team on your back like you were a hobo and they were a bindle!"

Grizz's voice was so grating that Dason almost forgot to hate the man. It's easier to be annoyed by someone than to hate them, after all.

He and Oriole collected their pay. To her credit, since they'd started working together, she'd been a little bit more vocal about her displeasure regarding Grizz's pay cuts.

Of course, there were things that came out of Oriole's mouth that Dason wouldn't have liked to hear coming out of a sailor's.

The tamer things she said were somewhat along the lines of "Fucking broke-dick piece of shit bear fucking his own clone coming into my goddamn good Octarian lifestyle and saying that I'm a quarter as good as any fucking inkling worker when I could tear my fucking legs off and throw them at the salmonids to do as much work as half of his 'profreshionals' do son of a bitch piece of shit ursine motherfucker..."

Sometimes, Oriole worried Dason.

"Hey," Dason said, and he realized just how nervous he sounded. Of course, talking to one's friend when they were in a tizzy was infinitely more terrifying than the sheer idea of facing a fuckton of fish that wanted to feast on your flesh and use your corpse as a spawning ground.

Alright he didn't know if Salmonids did that, but he wasn't going to assume that they didn't.

"You, uh... you want to go someplace to wind down?" Dason asked.

He was fully aware of the subtext that might come from this. It was the same kind of subtext that an author might include if they were writing a secret message to a friend that they cared about a great deal in order to assure them that there would always be a place for them to go for the sake of safety.

Except, you know, not at all.

In this case, Dason was trying to explain to Oriole that he was there to help her cool off and find some semblance of a happy place. Of course, there was the fact that he sometimes experienced warm, fuzzy feelings in the box in his chest where his heart should be, and that he wasn't sure how he felt about them.

She was sharp as a tack, skilled, knew strategy better than anyone else he knew at this present point in time, and... well, she was a good teammate.

And a good friend.

This is what a person thought of friends, of course.

~~Author's note, while he's on the run from the authorities: "Except, you know, not at all."~~

"You want to cut loose a little bit?" Dason asked. Of course, the mere concept of 'cutting loose' had a variety of connotations to a variety of people. Things such as sex, drugs, rock n roll, and fistfighting a well-known arsonist in the back alley of an Arby's.

Dason didn't have any of these things in mind, though there was an arsonist that he would want to fight out back of an Arby's if he knew half of the things that aforementioned arsonist had done.

As it was, though, he was facing Oriole's glare. The bags under her eyes had decreased somewhat in the two weeks that they'd been working together, and he'd even made a point to sleight-of-hand a touch or three of his earnings into her pay.

If she'd noticed, she hadn't commented on it.

However, she still seemed leery about going out together, even as friends. Dason had a suspicion that it was because it was an _event_ that required _money_ and that she didn't like _spending money_.

In some ways, Dason wished he could relate. He'd been a rich kid for the majority of his life, so he never knew what it was like to skip a meal or to have to go a summer without AC or a winter without heat.

Fortunately, he knew the solution to that glare.

"I'm buying," he said, and the tone of his voice was intended to calm her down more than anything else.

Oriole's glare softened for a moment before her gaze shifted away from him, and she muttered a much less vitriolic statement as they started to walk along.

"You do that too much."

Dason glanced at her for a moment as they made their way down past Ammo Knights, then Jelonzo's shop. "What was that?"

He'd heard her just fine, of course. He just didn't want to indicate that he'd heard if she didn't want to share.

"You offer to pay too much," Oriole said. Her voice wasn't nearly as hard as the statement made it sound, but he shifted his gaze away from her nevertheless.

"I have change to spare," Dason said, an echo of their first conversation. "And if there's one thing that my dad taught me, it's that if you're more fortunate, you should build a longer table and not a taller fence."

Oriole's eyes shifted back up to his, and they seemed softer, despite the set of her mouth. "Your dad sounds like a good man."

"I wish I remembered more about him," Dason said with a laugh as they kept walking.

They were about a block away from Dason's destination when Oriole asked, "What happened to him?"

"My dad?"

"Yes."

Dason was silent for a moment before he replied, "He left."

There was a pause in the conversation before Oriole replied. "Is that why you wear the mask?"

"No."

"You're a lot more short when it comes to your family," Oriole observed. The observation was enough for Dason to almost trip over his feet. Even so, he stumbled half a step before he caught his footing again.

To Dason's surprise, Oriole laughed.

He looked at her, though the way his mask blocked his vision, he was pretty sure that only one of the goggles was facing towards her.

"What?" Oriole said, still laughing.

"What's so funny?" Dason asked, and his voice came out colder than he intended, though Oriole continued as if his voice was a balmy spring day.

"You come across as being this tough-as-nails guy, but you're kind of a softie. I don't think I realized that until now," Oriole explained.

In this moment, Dason realized that there was something about Oriole that he should have noticed before.

"The further we get from Inkopolis Plaza," Dason commented as his mask moved to look forward once again, "The more at ease you get. I'm glad for that. You have a nice laugh and I think that the world needs to hear it more."

As if it was a switch, Oriole's expression changed back to the same dour demeanor that she'd worn at Grizzco just before they'd gone into their shift. Her face was set in a frown, and her eyes were hard as industrial diamond.

Dason couldn't help but smile. "You can't take it, but you're willing to dish it out?" he asked.

Oriole's voice was low. "You prod me like that again, I'm going to kick your ass."

Dason let out a chuckle of his own at that, and they paused in front of an arcade. "So how good are you at games?" he asked.

Oriole stared at the neon, mechanized joy that was prevalent throughout the arcade, then swallowed. If Dason hadn't been paying attention, he doubted that he would have noticed it.

"You're not a fan of arcades?" Dason asked.

"No," Oriole said nervously, then added, "I just can't remember being in one. I don't know if I like them or not."

Dason frowned behind his mask, and let out a sigh, "Time for the crash course, then. Come on."

He grabbed her hand and dragged her in.

"Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing?!"

"Come on. Time for the crash course."

Oriole started to stammer out protests, but Dason pulled out a couple of bills and fed them into the coin machine. Coins spewed out, and Dason grabbed one of the massive cups from the top and stuffed them into the cup until it was almost three-quarters of the way full.

Oriole stared at the cup for a second, her eyes almost popping out of her head. "Hey, do you really think that we're going to need that much? I don't want you wasting money on me."

"It's not a waste if we have a good time," Dason replied, and she couldn't see his smile behind his mask, "Come on."

The first game that he took her to was a racing game, where players could race together, and he didn't hesitate to feed coins into both machines as they settled in.

"I don't know how to play this," she said as she looked over at him once she was in the seat.

"Neither do I," Dason said.

They picked their cars, and the entire race consisted of them crashing into walls, other racers, and each other.

"Come on!" Oriole shouted.

"I told you I've never played this!"

"You drive like an old lady!"

"I know!" Dason said as he laughed and bumped into Oriole so she went on a ramp that put her three spaces ahead of him.

He finished in eighth place out of twelve, she finished in fourth, and she still wore a grin as they kept on going deeper into the arcade.

"Old lady driver," she said. "Couldn't even beat someone that had never played a game like that before."

He was glad that she was at least having a good time, though he didn't let up on his own barbs.

"Says the person that came in fourth."

"Better than coming in eighth!" Oriole said, and he could tell that she was on the verge of sticking her tongue out at him.

Even as they made their way through the machines, he realized that this was a far cry from the silent, almost sullen girl that he'd met those weeks ago. She'd opened up a little more, and a bright personality was starting to show through.

Even so, Dason had a sinking suspicion that it was forced.

"Do you like pinball?" Dason asked as they passed by a couple of machines.

Oriole paused, "What?"

"Pinball? You like?"

Oriole frowned at him for the first time since they'd entered the arcade. "Talking like a cave crab isn't helping you. I haven't played pinball, you nimrod."

Dason stopped in front of a machine and fed a couple coins into it before stepping aside and allowing her to play The Addams Family: The Pinball game.

"First time for everything," Dason said, and she stepped up to play the game. He didn't have to tell her how to work the plunger and the paddles, but he did have to tell her where to aim, even if it didn't do much good.

She managed to rack up a pretty high score, and he even cheered when she got the multiball. His statements of "Yeah! Yeah!" muffled by his gas mask, compounded by the fact that he threw his hands up in the air as he exclaimed were troublesome. A person from a period of time a few centuries before would compare his appearance to that of an insane pyromaniac with the song "Do You Believe in Magic" by The Lovin' Spoonful playing in their head on repeat.

Oriole just thought he was weird enough as it was, apparently.

After that, it was a game involving firefighters and a very large screen, an old-as-FUCK deep-sea-hunting game where the players searched for creatures out of human myth, and claw games.

To Dason's surprise, Oriole was so good at the claw games that he thought the arcade might have lost money.

By the time that they traded in the prizes, Dason was walking out with a very large Octillery plush in his arms while Oriole carried a much smaller Crabrawler plush.

"I still don't know why you're making me carry this," Dason said as they walked out. He readjusted the pokemon plush so it sat under his arm as he walked down the street.

"It's yours. Call it payback for the arcade," she said.

Dason frowned, and he added, "Fine. But I'm still getting you dinner."

"No you're not!"

"Just try and stop me!" Dason said right back.

They argued until they came to a seafood joint, and Dason dragged her inside. "Listen, we'll split something," he explained.

It was a while before Oriole acquiesced. "Fine..."

She looked at the cases for a while, her gaze fixated on a particularly nice-looking crab with long limbs, an almost fuchsia shell, and two markings around his eyestalks that made it look like he was wearing glasses.

Their seating hostess came by and led them to a table. Oriole ordered a glass of orange juice as her drink while Dason went with iced green tea.

"I'll give y'all a little more time," the waiter said as he walked off, and Oriole bit her lip as Dason sipped his tea.

"What's up?" he asked. He'd taken to picking up his glass around her so she wouldn't be nearly as weirded out, but he set it down now so she knew his full attention was on her.

"You said you were ok with splitting something, right?"

"I did," Dason said.

"It's... been a while since I had good shellfish. I mean like _good_ shellfish. Not the kind of stuff that Crusty Sean makes."

"Crusty Sean's is pretty good, though."

"It tastes good, but it's not _good_. You know?"

"I get it," Dason said. On the rare, bimonthly occasion where Kamila found that she had the time to cook for her children instead of just getting something on the way home or leaving them to fend for themselves, she had been fond of a clam bake or a crawfish boil. She spared no expense when it came to getting the ingredients, and it showed in the end result.

"You want to split something from the tank?" he asked.

Oriole paused, then nodded nervously.

"We didn't use all our tokens from the arcade," Dason said musingly, and he tapped his chin in mock thought, "So we can finish them up another time. And I was planning on snagging something for the two of us anyway..."

"Dason," Oriole said firmly.

He realized that he was talking dollars and cents with her, then gave a nervous laugh, "Sorry. Of course we can. You can pick."

Oriole's face brightened, and the waiter came back by after a moment to ask, "Alright, what are y'all lookin' at today?"

"Can I take a look at the tank?" Oriole asked. Dason couldn't help a smile, and he was glad that his gas mask could hide it. She was like a kid in a candy shop in some ways.

"Righto," the waiter said as he stepped aside so Oriole could stand up alongside him. "Let's go see what you'd like."

The waiter led her away and Dason was left alone to sip his tea in silence. He watched Oriole move from tank to tank, staring at the lobsters, the crabs, and even a couple of abalones and giant clams.

It wasn't long before she came back after having made her decision.

"I picked out our dinner," she said, almost bashfully.

"Cool," Dason said as he gave her a thumbs-up. It might have sounded callous, but he chose more of a noncommittal reply because he didn't want to make her feel bad about he size of the shellfish she'd picked out.

Oriole smiled at that.

"Are you more of a lemon or butter person?" Dason asked.

"I like them both," Oriole said. Her statement made it seem like there was more to the statement, but she didn't say anything more leading to Dason nodding his head in slow agreement.

"Then we'll do half and half. I'm more of a fan of the lemon myself, but I like the butter anyways."

Oriole's cheeks darkened somewhat, as if she was embarrassed by how quickly he was willing to provide concessions to her.

"Why are you so nice to me?" she asked.

Dason tilted his head in confusion. "You have my back. That's why. I know that you'd do the same, if you had the opportunity."

"Yeah," she said, "But I'm an octoling."

Dason was even more confused by that. Was that supposed to mean something?

Perhaps the tilt of his head had betrayed his additional confusion, because she continued, "It wasn't until two years ago when places like this might turn me away because I was an octo, and it's almost like you're ignoring it. Why?"

If Dason's weird-ass powers had included causing things to spark into existence instead of making them spark into his stomach, he would have had no less than four question marks popping up over his head in neon green.

"You just don't seem to care about me being an octoling," Oriole said as she put her hands in her lap and glanced out the window. Then, as if she was worried that someone walking by might make eye contact with her, she shifted her gaze downward so she was looking at the joint of the glass and the windowframe.

"That's because I don't," Dason said, and Oriole's eyes snapped towards him with a vengeance.

Before she had a chance to reply, he said, "I don't care that you're an octoling. You're Oriole. That's it. You're a good teammate, and I'd think the same about you if you were an inkling, an urchin, a spider crab, or a shrimp. You have my back, and I have yours. Your species doesn't matter."

That much was the truth from Dason's perspective. If there was one thing that his mother had taught him that actually benefited him, it was that anyone could be good, and that anyone could be terrible.

His mother, a person of the same species as him, was terrible.

Oriole, a person of the species that was the supposed sworn enemy of the inklings, was good.

He couldn't tell her that in words, right now, mainly because their server brought by their meal. It was the same purple crab with the black eyestalk marks that she had been looking longingly at, before. Its legs were split along the middle, and it was served with melted butter and with the back part of its shell pulled off so they could get at the tasty goodness inside.

Dason picked up his fork and got out a forkful of crab meat before he raised it up to her in something that vaguely resembled a toast.

"To having each other's backs."

Slowly, almost cautiously, Oriole replicated his gesture, and they tapped their forks against one another's.

"To having each other's backs," she agreed, and there was a vestige of a smile at the corner of her mouth.


	11. Chapter 11

There was something weird in the air tonight.

Some would say that they could feel it, and Dason certainly could.

It was a later shift, and the sun was beginning to set off in the distance, but Grizz was still greedy for more eggs, and that meant that there would be more shifts until the sun went down and the Salmonids began to swarm more regularly.

Oriole stood off to Dason's side as they approached The Ruins of Ark Polaris, and he frowned.

Those rails were going to be the death of him. Possibly a few times.

"You don't like this place?" Oriole asked, as if reading his mind.

"You do?" he retorted.

"Oh fuck no," she shot right back, "I never know where I am and the further down I go, the more miserable I get."

He gave a chuckle at that. They'd been working together for a couple of weeks now, and it was at least nice having a minimum of one other competent person on the crew. They each had their weaknesses, of course. Dason wasn't very good with chargers while Oriole still needed to work on her throwing arm, but they were at least getting a little bit better on those fronts.

For the first time since he'd joined Grizzco, Dason felt like he was actually having fun instead of just doing work for the sake of the money.

The headset in their helmets buzzed, and Grizz's scratchy voice came through with a bark that made Dason turn down the volume slightly. "Alright, Bait! Listen up! I've got word from a couple of reliable sources that there might be a new Salmonid taking the field today. Be on your guard and don't let them get the drop on you. Grizz out."

"Well that was less than specific," Dason commented as he frowned behind his mask.

"You're annoyed, aren't you?" Oriole asked. She wasn't commenting on his words, but rather the expression he wore where she couldn't see it.

"Yeah," he said. Slowly but surely, she was learning to read the subtleties of a gas mask's expression. He wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

The tug eased to a stop.

"Alright, folks!" the flounder in the cockpit called, "Ship off! Weapons are just below me!"

None of them needed that instruction. From the looks of things, they were all veterans of some stripe or another.

Oriole found herself with a Splattershot Jr. while Dason had been a little slow on the draw and was stuck with a Goo Tuber.

Why anyone would ever create this weapon, Dason had no idea. It was just a tube. Might as well hook a fire hose to his back and drain his ink in a matter of milliseconds. Maybe he'd actually be able to do some damage that way.

Dason hooked the weapon up to his ink tank and super-jumped off the tug. He would have to resolve himself to keeping the high ground for this first wave.

"Alright, Bait! Incoming!" Grizz's scratchy voice called. Couldn't he at least invest in better speakers so he wouldn't give his employees tinnitus?

Immediately, Dason saw a Steelhead and squeezed off a shot as it started to hock its loogey. It exploded and took out the Chums and Smallfries that were swarming around it.

He resigned himself to the fact that it was probably going to be the only good shot that he got off this wave, and started collecting eggs.

Oriole, on the other hand, dominated. She was in her element with a shooter, and took out a Stinger on the bottom level and a Scrapper on the top in the same time that it took him to get two eggs from where he splatted the Steelhead.

He also wasn't that surprised when she managed to score four eggs in that time, as well.  
The other two members of their team, a pair of identical twins by the look of them, weren't terrible, but they weren't great either. One of them held a Squelcher while the other barely managed a Hydra Splatling.

At least they had some range to make up for the shitty pick of the Goo Tuber that Dason held.

They managed to get a total of sixteen eggs, four over quota, and they swapped.

Oriole was landed with the Splatling while Dason held the Splattershot Jr, and their headphones crackled with static and feedback once again.

"They're here, you maggots! The new salmonid weapons! Take them out before they get their shit all over the place!" Grizz roared, and Dason had to resist the urge to turn Grizz off.

Dason frowned, though. Shit? All over the place? Every salmonid left behind a trail of nasty goo of some kind or another and-

He saw a Chum wearing a gas mask riding what looked like a motorbike with a pair of smokestacks coming up off the back end, laughing manically as it proceeded to... well, spew shit all over the place.

The trail of smoke didn't seem to impede the salmonids any, but it looked black as pitch and left a pretty big trail behind it that lingered for a while before it dissipated.

However, Dason's grief with it was a little more personal.

"That... bastard," Dason growled as he readied his weapon.

"What?" Oriole asked, just as confused by his statement as she was by the situation.

"He stole my aesthetic!" Dason said as he charged into the breach.

"What?!" Oriole said. Her voice was filled with disbelief. There was no way that he could be this much of a dork...

Was there?

Unfortunately, there was. Dason tore into the salmonid lines, making a way for the Style Thief and unloading a salvo of ink right into its dumb face.

It exploded, and Dason dove in to retrieve the golden eggs and found...

Nothing.

The dumb bastard didn't drop any eggs.

"You come to my shift," He muttered as he fell back and started to support his team, "Jack my style, and then it turns out that you're like a cheap circumcision."

The goo tuber that he was guarding, one of the twins, looked over at him and asked only, "What?"

_"IT'S A FUCKING RIP-OFF!"_ Dason shouted as he took out one of those Mary-Poppins-looking fuckers.

"So..." the twin said, trying not to be weirded out by what Dason was saying, "Don't kill them?"

Immediately, Dason heard the sounds of coughing, and they looked over to see gobbets of ink from the Squelcher shooting out blindly while the aim wavered and the person holding it collapsed.

"Bro!" the goo tuber said as a horde of smallfries collapsed on the fallen inkling and spatted them.

"Does that answer your question?" Dason said coldly as he mopped up and brought the Squelcher back.

The goo tuber didn't reply, instead turning his efforts into taking out as many salmonids as he could (which, considering his unfortunate weapon, wasn't many).

It wasn't long after that Dason heard Oriole scream.

It wasn't a scream of surprise, or of terror, but rather pure, unadulterated pain. She occasionally paused to cough, swear a little in a wheezing voice, and then keep coughing, but it was mostly the angry, pained swearing.

Dason rushed to her, completely ignoring the smoke, and saw her with reddened eyes and tears streaming down her cheeks as she laid about with the splatling in an attempt to keep the salmonids off her.

Dason cleared up and said, "Make your way back to the tower!"

"Where is it?!" Oriole replied, and Dason winced. She was blinded, it appeared.

Dason guided her, covering with his own fire and directing her to where she should open up to do the most damage. They were each able to snag a single golden egg, but they weren't able to dunk them before the timer ran out, leaving them three eggs short.

Fuck.

Dason and Oriole jumped back to the tug and it began moving them out of there as the sun sank into the distant ocean, and Oriole immediately made a beeline for the head.

Dason sat there, worrying.

He wasn't really that angry about the shift, truth be told. He was more angry about the fact that they had been faced with an unknown enemy and that the aforementioned enemy had caused Oriole such pain.

She came out of the head after five minutes of running water, and Dason saw her placing a contacts case into the pocket of her jumpsuit under her overalls.

She looked up at him, and Dason couldn't help but stare.

Her eyes were still red, to be sure, but they weren't nearly as bad as they had been. However, while her eyes had been orange when they got together at the arcade the other day, they were now a brilliant steel grey.

Her eyes were the color of a freshly-tempered knife, and they seemed to cut almost as deep. He forced himself to tear his gaze away from her face.

"If I'd known we were going to be facing that," Oriole grumbled as she took her spot beside him, "I wouldn't have brought them along and just dealt with the coughing." Her voice was still a little hoarse, but it wasn't too far off from her normal tone.

"I think that we're done for the day, then," Dason said. After something like that, she likely wouldn't want to go out for another shift, especially not when there were potentially more Style Thieves floating around.

Oriole let out a sigh and said, "Want to do burgers for dinner, then?"

"I'm down," Dason agreed.

He didn't comment on her eyes.

He didn't think he had to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The design for the Smoker salmonid was created by Clodcast. Check it out under the "salmon run" tag on his blog sometime!


	12. Chapter 12

"Dason Stormbringer to Manager's Office... Manager's Office, Dason Stormbringer..."

The voice drawled lazily out of the speakers of Grizzco as Dason undressed from his most recent shift. It was the quality of voice that seemed to say "I absolutely hate this job and I refuse to work at it for a second longer than I can afford to on account of my boss being a greasy piece of fuck bear."

Dason didn't pick up that subtlety, though, and straightened up. He had seen a couple of signs pointing towards the Manager's office (which he could only assume was Grizz Himself), and followed them as best as he could.

He entered a foyer and saw a very bored-looking eel sitting behind a desk as he entered, and she looked up with an expression that somehow managed to be even more bored than she was before.

"Stormbringer?"

"Yes. How did you know?"

"Well, I didn't call for anyone else. Take this," she said as she extended a respawn token to Dason. She swiveled her head back to the game of solitare she had open on her computer even as he took it and clipped it onto the inside of the pocket.

"What's it for?" Dason asked.

"In case Mr. Grizz is dissatisfied with something you would say," she replied, then sighed as if she had said this a thousand times before. "And you didn't take an opportunity to apologize and mean it."

Dason gulped. Apparently, he was going to visit the big boss, and he didn't know what to expect.

He went into the next room and felt his ink change to the color of the respawn point that he stepped on, and he glanced at one of the transport tubes that he'd seen so many times in turf wars.

This was not what he expected.

Dason dropped into the ink stream and rode along for what seemed like a very long time. Since it only took him about seven seconds to get from the bottom to the top of Moray Towers, he had to have traveled a couple of blocks, at least.

When he came up, he was in a dark room, with lights only on one side. He could see the faint outline of an ornately carved desk and a pair of gloved hands.

"Mr. Stormbringer," said the owner of those hands. The voice was rich, sonorous, and better-suited to come through the speakers of a radio than it was coming out of an old novelty stereo set.

How old was that damn thing that it turned that almost fatherly butter into sounding like your alcoholic uncle was demanding that you get him another beer?

Dason tried not to think about it too much, and only replied, "Sir."

"No need for that kind of formality," the voice said as one of the hands gestured towards one of the chairs in the room. They were plush, overstuffed things with wings that went around the head, presumably to make the seated feel trapped. "Please. Take a seat."

Dason sat down and crossed one leg over the other, folding his hands in his lap and watching the person behind the desk.

"Do you know why I have called you here today?" the voice said.

"I'll answer that question provided you answer one of my own," Dason said.

The head behind the desk tilted and turned to face him more fully. "And what is that?"

"Are you actually Mr. Grizz?"

"I assume that you're asking this because I'm not a bear-shaped stereo?"

"Something along those lines. But for all I know, you could be a proxy that Grizz is using in order to talk to us."

"I assure you," The voice said, "I am Mr. Grizz."

Dason still didn't trust him. But for the purpose of the conversation, he would call the figure Mr. Grizz.

"Wait, then what's your first name?" he asked, primarily out of curiosity.

"Mr. Grizz."

Dason's face twisted in confusion. "Then what's your last name?"

"Eggbert."

"Do you have a middle name?"

"High-five. But this is getting off topic."

Dason stared at Mr. Grizz High-Five Eggbert (allegedly), and settled back in his chair. He felt like Grizz was fucking with him, but decided to let it slide for the purpose of the discussion.

"I don't know why you've called me to your office, Mr. Grizz," Dason said.

"It's regarding your interactions with the Octoling known as Oriole Sterling," Mr. Grizz replied from the shadows. One hand went to a box and opened it up, withdrawing something from inside. "Cigar?"

So that was her last name. Of course, Dason wouldn't mention it to her unless she mentioned it first. "I'll pass," Dason said, holding up a hand.

Mr. Grizz presumably put the end of the cigar in his mouth and lit it with a small torch that didn't provide much light, just a triangle of blue in the black, followed by an ember on the tip of the smoke.

Mr. Grizz exhaled and let out a plume that cascaded into the room and filled it with a rich, earthy aroma. "You understand why I dock her pay, correct?"

Dason stared at Mr. Grizz for a moment, then considered the right answer.

Of course, due to the anger that was currently boiling in his belly, he didn't speak the right answer out loud.

"Because you're a racist asshole?"

Mr Grizz's other hand moved to another part of the desk and flipped up a... something that revealed a glowing red button.

"Would you care to repeat that, Mr. Stormbringer?"

"I'd rather not," Dason said, thankful that the receptionist had warned him about offending the boss... whatever.

"Smarter than you look. I'll leave this open for the time being, though, in order to dissuade any other careless comments," Mr. Grizz said before he took another draw on his cigar.

After the exhale, Mr. Grizz commented, "You are correct about one thing, though: I do not care much for the Octarians."

"Might I ask why?" Dason asked.

"Of course," Mr. Grizz said, "After all, that is the purpose of this meeting."

Dason frowned slightly at that and was grateful that his mask hid his face. "What do you mean?"

Mr. Grizz pressed another button on his desk and revealed side-by-side comparisons between Salmonid weaponry that Dason had faced time and again, alongside Octarian weapons that had been leaked from the Squidbeak Splatoon files over the course of the past couple of years.

"It is my belief that the Octarians are supplying the Salmonids with their more complex weaponry, as crude as it may look to us," Mr. Grizz said before flipping through a couple more slides.

Stingers compared to the Octarian Stingray.

Flyfish compared to the Tenta-missiles.

Steelheads compared to the Splashdown.

Dason swallowed, and hoped that Grizz didn't see.

"Your friend may be selling secrets," Grizz said before taking another puff of his cigar.

"I don't think that Oriole would. She can hardly talk to someone, let alone serve as a spy," Dason said.

"That's how spies work, Mr. Stormbringer," Grizz said as he tapped the ash off into an ashtray. "They don't attract attention, they stay under the radar, and they take what they can and give nothing back. She's a spy for the Octarian race, and you would do well to keep clear of her."

"With all due respect," Dason said, considering the red button and calculating his response carefully, "I will continue to interact with her. She's competent, an excellent employee, and the two of us combined have managed to turn in more Golden Eggs than entire shifts have on occasion."

Mr. Grizz grumbled at that. He couldn't argue with numbers, and had apparently seen their combined results compared to other shifts. "While you are correct, it would be more beneficial to you that you stand on the right side of the fight when everything goes to hell."

"I'm afraid I must politely decline, Mr. Grizz High-Five Eggbert," Dason said with as straight a face as he could muster. Despite the ridiculousness of the name, he managed to stay relatively calm as he rose. "She is my friend, and I will continue working with her for the forseeable future."

"If you continue on like that, I will dock your pay," Mr. Grizz said without a moment's hesitation.

Dason replied just as quickly, "And if you dock my pay, I will leave Grizzco, and you will lose one of your top earners."

Grizz was silent for a moment, then grumbled. "Very well. Just know that you'll be standing on the wrong side of history when the Octarian Uprising occurs, and the Salmonids storm our shores. You will be first on the chopping block because you sided with them over us in the early days."

Dason quelled the rage inside him, and didn't even have to look at the button to do it. "Then that is a risk I am willing to take."

Mr. Grizz finally looked at Dason. His eyes opened, and Dason saw two rings of glowing electric blue set in the shadowy face, as well as spots of the same color appearing all along the body and glowing faintly through clothes. "Then I expect you to lay in your bed now that you've made it. Leave."

Dason turned to the transport tube an fell right back in it.

"Oh good," the secretary said, "You're back. How did it go?"

She still sounded uninterested, and Dason paused only for a moment to say, "Not as poorly as you expected, I think."

"Hearing you all get splatted one after another is probably the only entertainment that I get all day," the secretary said. "Have a nice day."

Dason left and exited to see Oriole sitting on the same bench that she had been sitting on before.

"Hey," she said as she saw him exit. "I worked an extra shift while you were out. How did it go?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary," Dason lied, and he thought he made it sound pretty convincing. "He just wanted to talk about my numbers, commend me on my exceptional progress, that sort of thing."

"Seeing how well you work..." Oriole said with a quiet chuckle. Dason couldn't help but smile at that.

"How about udon for lunch? I'm starving," he asked.

"I can get behind that," she replied as they fell into step together.

Spy or no, he would stand beside her.

For better or for worse.


	13. Chapter 13

She was quiet. More so than usual.

Oriole idly stirred the cup of black coffee in front of her, the two sugar cubes that she'd dropped in long since dissolved, and Dason felt the need to speak up.

"Want to come over to my place?"

It was a normal enough question, but there was the idea that he was a guy and she was a girl, even though Dason only viewed her as a friend right now.

That wasn't to say that she was attractive, of course. Since they'd started hanging out, she'd stood up a little bit straighter, and the bags under her eyes had faded somewhat. Once again, not much, but it was definitely noticeable.

To top it all off, since they'd been getting lunch together three times a week for the past two months, she looked a lot less unhealthily thin. Her tentacles shone with a bright luster, her skin appeared less sallow, and she generally seemed... well, better.

That didn't make her look good when she blanched and stammered out "W... what?!"

"My place. Hang out. Want to?" Dason said. He didn't intend for the words to sound like he was speaking to an exceptionally slow child, but he had the feeling that's exactly what it sounded like.

Oriole frowned, more likely than not at the inadvertent insult to her intelligence, but she didn't say anything further as she sipped her coffee and watched him with a wary gaze.

"It's nothing like that," Dason said as he held up his hands somewhat defensively. "Just to hang out. Play some video games. I got the new Mario Kart."

Oriole's ears twitched slightly and Dason had to resist the urge to smile. It turns out that girls did not, in fact, want boys. They wanted pizza and Mario Kart.

Unfortunately, Oriole would only get one of those today. He'd bought them pizza the last time that they had lunch and he didn't want her getting sick of it.

"Depends," Oriole said, and Dason could tell that she was trying very hard not to sound interested. "Where's your place?"

"A bit of a ride away, but it's in a good neighborhood," Dason admitted. It'd probably take them the better part of a half an hour to get there.

Oriole made a show of checking her phone, and she shrugged at the idea. "I guess I could come by and kill some time."

Dason was well aware that she could probably tell he was grinning behind his mask, because she arched a bemused eyebrow and took another sip of her coffee.

"What?" he asked with a laugh to his voice.

"You're unnecessarily excited about this."

The truth of the matter was that he'd been wanting to ask her over for a while. She'd watched his back on more than one occasion, just as he'd watched hers, and he enjoyed spending time with her outside of work. To put it simply, he trusted Oriole.

He at least trusted her enough to let her see him without the mask.

He knew it was a big step, but she hadn't pried about his secrets once he made it clear that doing so wasn't going to get her any answers.

She was reliable, kind, and she was understanding.

What more could a squid ask for?

Dason finished up his iced tea with not even so much as a shudder from Oriole, further proving that she'd at least gotten used to some of his weird, and he stood up.

Oriole downed the rest of her coffee in what seemed like a single gulp and rose with him and they walked towards the train station together.

"So, how's the paperwork coming for your Turf War approval?" Dason asked, and he could tell by the even deeper chill to the air that it was a topic that Oriole _really_ didn't want to talk about.

Even so, she spoke through gritted teeth.

"I swear to whatever higher power there is: If I meet this Kamila Brook cunt face to face, I'm going to make her choke to death on her own feces."

Dason was trapped between an array of emotions that did not line up in any way.

On one hand, he was tempted to say, "I'll hold your hat if you do" because he really wanted to see Kamila get her self-righteous ass beaten.

On another hand, he was mortified at the fact that she had used such foul language with regards to the woman that had supposedly given birth to him... even if he did think that she deserved it...

On a third hand that he might spontaneously grow at any second due to overexposure to radioactive salmonids (fucking Goldies), he was equal parts impressed and terrified by the fact that her mind worked in such a way as to think that choking someone on their own excrement was a suitable punishment for holding her up for... wow.

It had to be almost a year, now.

He'd ask Valentina to holler at Kamila about it, but he didn't want to owe Valentina that big of a favor right now.

Mainly on account of he wouldn't be able to pay it off without sacrificing something that he would never be able to get back.

It wasn't that Valentina was vindictive, or that she was the kind to demand that he pay her back for things at a heightened interest rate... like Koi had been...

Dason just had the feeling that she was still pissed at him for leaving when he had.

Strange how grudges could turn out that way.

Even so, navel-gazing was going to get him nowhere, so he instead responded to Oriole after what he thought was an appropriate amount of time to display shocked silence.

"That bad, huh?"

"It's been ten months, Dason."

"Yup," he sighed, "That bad."

"I don't know if you'd understand, but the Turf War Authority is bullshit," Oriole said sourly as they got onto their train.

"I'm aware," Dason said, "Last time I got tangled up with them, I-"

He realized what he was about to do and cut himself off. Not here, not now. Not with so many people around that might be able to hear, and certainly not with him obviously talking to Oriole about it.

Valentina had been a target because Dason cared about her. He was _not_ going to let the same happen to Oriole.

He only now realized that Oriole was staring at him as if she wanted him to continue.

"Nevermind. Another time," he muttered, and Oriole's brows knit together in a combination of confusion and frustration.

He'd been oddly silent for the most part of the last few minutes, he realized. Then again, he'd also been oddly introspective. Why was he getting into the wherefores and whys of the inner machinations of his mind today?

The train started to move.

It was probably just his nerves.

He and Oriole were mostly quiet on their way to his apartment, at least until they left the train and caught the bus. "What floor are you on?" Oriole asked once they stepped off.

"Six," Dason said as they started walking. The November breeze was chilly, which made him glad for his sweater. He could deal with the heat, just not with the cold. Hell, he'd probably wear a winter jacket in the desert and be fine, but he'd be bundled up tighter than a kid in a Chicago Polar Vortex once winter came by.

Oriole pulled a little tighter in on herself hen a gust came by.

He wished he could do something to help, aside from giving her the jacket off his back. That would be a tremendously bad idea, because he was worried that he'd freeze his goddamn tentacles off.

They got onto the bus, which was a short ride to his apartment, a few blocks at most, and the stop was right across the street from his building.

Dason pointed at it and said, "Right over there," but stopped as he started to cross the street.

Oriole was staring at his apartment building with wide eyes and her jaw nearly touching the sidewalk.

"Hey," she said after she finally picked it up off the ground, "Quick question: What the fuck?"

It made sense, he supposed. His apartment was on the same level of "Nice" as Moray Towers, but his location ensured that his rent was much, much lower.

Dason shrugged at that and said only, "Grizz pays me well."

This was, of course, omitting the fact that he'd gathered quite the nest egg before he even started working at Grizzco.

That was obviously the wrong thing to say, though, mainly because Oriole was muttering "Stupid fucking piece of shit-bitch bear probably fucks his own mother..." and a mess of other curses that are too impolite to list anywhere except for in the transcript of a particularly filthy porno.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the elevator was out.

Dason groaned as they walked past the front desk, and gestured at the elevator while he looked at the person behind the counter. An inkling with her tentacles done up in a bun only shrugged and said, "It'll be up and running tomorrow, Mr. Stormbringer. For now, you and your guest will just have to use the stairs."

A minor inconvenience, then.

Most of the time, when Dason was by himself, he took the stairs. However, he didn't know how used to stairs Oriole was, especially since he didn't warn her about them beforehand.

Not that he thought she was a delicate flower that needed protection from the elements (cold excluded), but he just wanted to make this as nice as possible for her.

Those thoughts went right out the window once he opened the door to the stairwell and she started taking the flight two at a time.

Dason watched her as she reached the landing with a mild expression of awe, and Oriole tapped her foot impatiently.

"This isn't a big deal," she said as if she was reading his mind. "I live on the ninth floor, and we don't have a working elevator for half of the year."

Now that just seemed outright inhumane.

Dason started bounding up them after her, and he was right behind her when they reached the sixth floor landing. She was barely out of breath, which made sense, all things considered, and he opened the door for her.

"What apartment?" she asked as she glanced down the hallway.

"626," he replied, and led the way to the one in question. He unlocked the door and pushed it open to admit Oriole before he followed inside.

Even as he took off his hoodie and hung it on the rack next to the door, she stared in awe.

The entryway of his apartment opened up into a large living room with a well-established kitchen in the back, and a balcony that would look out across the city. Off to one side was a hallway that would lead to his bedroom, his storage room (a bedroom full of boxes that he hadn't gotten around to unpacking yet), and the bathroom. The setup was normal enough... save for the fact that it looked like it was big enough to play basketball in.

Oriole stared at him in shock once again as he plucked her hat off her head and hung it from the rack. Again, he only shrugged. "I didn't want this much space, but it was one of the smaller ones that they had."

"You must be one of those stupid rich kids," Oriole muttered as she took off her jacket and hung it up next to her hat.

Dason only said, "Eh," and removed his shoes before he walked in. He didn't like talking about his mother's money. Hell, he didn't even want to talk about his mother, considering that the bitch was handling Oriole's paperwork... and badly, to absolutely nobody's surprise.

"Tea?" he asked.

"Please," Oriole said as she removed her boots and made her way over to the couch. She sat on it, then let out a sigh of relief.

Dason's couch was very comfortable, and he knew it. Hell, he'd slept on it more often than he'd slept in his bed, all things considered.

He put the kettle on, got out two teabags and mugs, a splash of honey for each, then started setting up his Switch so they could play Mario Kart.

He handed her the Joycons while he kept his Pro Controller for himself, and paused.

"What's up?" Oriole asked curiously.

Dason looked over at her and asked, "Mind if I take the mask off?"

Oriole stiffened. He was well aware why. She had seen him with the mask so often that she had likely thought it was his face itself, to say nothing of how he'd apparently developed a method to eat with it on.

"Um... sure. Your house, your rules," Oriole said, though he could feel her gaze on his face even as he undid the clasps behind his head.

"Sorry," he said as he started to remove it. "I can't really play with it on. Tunnel vision, you know?"

He set the mask on the table, well aware that the profile that she was seeing was his undamaged face.

"Wow," Oriole said, though it was more in admiration than anything else. Did she think that he was handsome?

Nah. Inconcievable.

"You're not that bad-looking," she said, proving that it was, in fact, conceivable. "I thought you were wearing it because your face was all covered in warts, or acne or-"

Dason turned to face her, showing off the burns alongside the regular half.

Oriole didn't say anything, but her reaction spoke volumes. Her voice cut off in a choke, her breath hitched, and she turned white as a sheet, even as Dason blinked lazily at her.

He'd gotten used to his face. He knew that it could be a shock for some others, but he trusted her enough not to make fun of him or anything of the sort.

Dason turned back to the game and started it up, selecting a relatively easy racing cup, and picking Dry Bones as his racer.

Faintly, he heard Oriole mutter, "Open mouth, insert foot..." as she picked Toad.

They got through the first racetrack without so much as a word between them, and finished just in time for the kettle to start whistling.

Dason rose from his seat and went into the kitchen to pour out the tea and brought the mugs back in to the coffee table.

"Coasters, please?" he asked, nodding at the little container of wooden coasters that he'd set up on one corner.

Oriole wordlessly obliged him and took the warm mug from him before she stared down into its depths.

She was still upset about the whole scars thing.

Dason took a sip of his tea.

Oriole's gaze snapped towards him, shock plastered on her features.

"What?" Dason asked as he set the mug down.

"Did... did you just use your _mouth?_ " she asked, her voice tinged with something that was a couple of shades shy of fear.

"Um... yes?"

"For consumption?"

"Yes."

"What the fuck?!"

Dason just stared at her levelly and turned back to the game.

"Here I was, thinking that you would be a whole different person without the gas mask on," she said, "But it's still you. A little different, but still you."

"And the reason I wear the mask?" Dason asked coolly. It was a little hard to keep a defensive note out of his voice, but he managed to succeed.

"It's your face," Oriole said with a shrug. "Not like you can change it, or like I can."

Dason smiled a little at that, but his smile slipped away at her next question.

"Can I touch it?"

Dason paused and looked back at her, his expression confused. "Why?"

"I..." Oriole started to say, then bit her lip. "I think that I want to because I want to know it's part of you, and if I know it's part of you, it'll be less scary. Does that make sense?"

"No," Dason said.

"Oh..."

"But if it'll make you feel better, you can touch it if you want," Dason said as he scooted over to her.

He turned his face towards her, and closed his eyes. He trusted her.

Her fingers trembled when they first touched the abnormally smooth skin of his burn scars, then traced over the crags and valleys in his face as they got steadier.

When her fingers fell away, Dason opened his eyes, and saw Oriole with an expression of awe on her face.

He only realized that this was the first time that he'd seen her without the mask.

She was... well, beautiful. Like, not in the way that the Squid Sisters were beautiful, or even actresses, but she was beautiful in that "girl next door" kind of way, where she had features that would have looked plain on any other face, but combined together in order to create something pretty. She had a slender neck, strong-looking arms, and the t-shirt she wore (a goofy thing with red sleeves on a white shirt and print that read "Fuck you staring at?") clung a little tightly across her chest. Dason tried not to stare at that.

Instead, he stared at her face. Her eyes twinkled like a distant star, and her expression was not one of fear, but of amazement.

Dason felt his heart do something uncomfortable that he was not used to, and he was tempted to say audibly "What the fuck," even as it continued to spread throughout his body.

He didn't say it out loud because there was no way to do so without hurting her feelings.

"Do they still hurt?" she asked.

"When I get a mosquito bite, they itch more than usual," Dason said as he scooted back away from her. "Though I think that's because I can't scratch them the way I want to."

Oriole smiled at that, then tilted her head back to the game. "Should we keep going?"

Dason returned the smile and said, "Only if you're ready to get your ass beat."

"Oh, you're going down," Oriole said, the enthusiasm restored.

About thirty seconds later, she hollered out, "You motherfucker! Did you just blue shell me?!"

They both laughed all the way through the cup, and the one after that.

More than anything else, Dason knew that he made a good decision to bring her into his life.

***

"Okay," Valentina said as she slammed her hands down on the table, "Hold the fucking phone."

Starkey and Claire looked over at her across the closed pizza boxes, and she gestured at Dason with all four fingers pointing at her brother. "You _showed_ her?!"

"I had to at some point!" Dason protested. "I mean, do you think that I'd leave the mask on when we-"

He cut himself off, then stared back at his pizza. Another bite disappeared from it.

"No, no," Valentina said as she crossed her arms, "Do continue."

"I don't want to," Dason said.

"Fucking thought so."

"Excuse me," Starkey said, and their attention shifted over to him. "You said that you took off the mask because you trusted her. Does that mean that you don't trust us?"

Dason paused, then straightened up, his hands moving back to the clasps.

Claire braced herself for what was to come. From the way that he'd made it sound, he looked like a comic book villain and should probably have a madman in a bat costume running around after him.

But when the mask came away, he just... looked more or less normal. Sure, half of his face was a perpetually angry red and covered in crags and half-melted skin, but it wasn't nearly as bad as she thought.

Then again, compared to Oriole, Claire had at least had his version of the description before he took the mask off. He sat it down, and Claire took in the surreal sight of Dason taking a bite of his pizza with his actual mouth instead of just vorping it out of existence.

No need for comical "chomp" sound effects today.

"It's not as bad as you made it sound," Claire said, hoping that it wouldn't upset him.

Dason only shrugged and said, "Nice to know I'm not some kind of hideous, malformed monster."

Claire started to stammer, "I... that's... that's not what I-"

"I know," Dason said, and the only unsettling thing about his scars was what it did to his smile when he grinned. It looked lopsided, but that didn't make it any less earnest. "I'm just messing with you."

Claire slumped back in her chair, mildly embarrassed, and she had to find Starkey's hand for comfort.

Dason took another bite of his slice and swallowed before he gestured at the pair and said, "Alright, now that we've got this out of the way, you'll want to buckle up. Shit's about to get serious."


	14. Chapter 14

They'd fallen into a bit of a routine after that. Every other day, maybe every third day, after their Grizzco shift, it would be a pretty simple plan.

Get food (they took turns picking what they wanted). Dason eats weird and Oriole pretends not to notice. Then they go back to his apartment and play video games.

After seeing how much Oriole enjoyed Mario Kart, Mario Party, and Smash, Dason decided to try and expand her horizons by going out and getting an XCube with a couple of titles like Cogs of Conflict, Summons of Responsibility, and Nimbus: Arrival.

Oriole hadn't been as big of a fan of those because they could just live that life at work if they wanted to, but she stuck to the first game the Black Auras series, even if there was a massive amount of cussing that went on during it.

Dason briefly entertained the idea of doing a gaming stream with her and posting it on Quiver. The idea was only halfhearted, mainly on account of how he didn't want to make her a target for his enemies should they decide to come back for more.

Fortunately (though it certainly seemed unfortunate at the time), he entertained this idea while she was in the kitchen making a sandwich for the two of them to share, and she had a knife in her hand.

That day almost didn't end well.

However, after several messy shifts where Dason wasn't on his A Game and a couple of steamed pork buns from a local Chinese street food joint, Oriole asked, "What kind of games do we have today?"

She'd seemed to force her way through Black Auras despite the fact that she had used several words that one shouldn't use around children under the age of twenty-five, and had finished up about two weeks after their first failed experiment with the rooty-tooty-shooty games. Even so, she wanted to take a break before she tried her hand at the second.

"Under normal circumstances, I'd suggest the Killer's Promise series, but we can't hang out at my place today," Dason said with a sour note of discomfort in his voice.

Oriole finished chewing a bite of her bun and asked, "Why not?"

Dason shuddered as he recounted the sound of boards splintering. He had been in the living room when it had happened, and he didn't want to think about it.

"The milk went bad. Three people got injured," he said, hoping that she'd accept that reason and just let it go.

Oriole stared at him. There may be some strange things that he said/did that she would let go, but this did not appear to be one of them.

"The milk," she said flatly.

"It went bad. Took the pie server that I left in the fridge and whacked my neighbors."

Oriole's eyes narrowed.

"What's the real reason," she asked, and her voice didn't make it sound like a question. Instead, it sounded like a "you tell me right now or I'll sell your kneecaps on the black market."

Dason took a deep breath, took a bite of his bao (much to the surprise of a strung-out homeless person walking by), and told the truth.

"Upstairs neighbors fell through my ceiling. Kiddy Pool. Mac N Cheese. Sexy Nazgul cosplay. Waiting on repairs and cleaning."

Oriole stared at him, shocked.

"What?" Dason asked as he folded his arms defensively.

"Usually," Oriole said as she found her voice after a few minutes, "When someone asks for the truth, you don't give them a less believable lie."

"Listen, I couldn't believe it, either," Dason said. "The Nazgul cosplay wasn't even that sexy, and they were just using blue box mac n cheese. I mean, fuck. If you're going to go all-out like that, at least use shells and cheese for Zapfish's sake."

Oriole still stared at him warily.

"So, assuming that this actually did happen," Oriole said, though she had a wry tone to her voice. "They saw you without your mask. Isn't that supposed to be really embarrassing?"

"No. The second the ceiling started to collapse, I put it on."

"And where was it?"

"Across the room."

"You put it on from across the room. While the ceiling was caving in."

"Yeah, I found out in a panic that my... you know... doesn't just work with food. I was surprised too."

Oriole's expression turned somehow even more bewildered and flustered.

"That part I can believe."

"But not the rest?"

"No."

Dason reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. "I have pictures."

As he extended the phone out towards her, Oriole put up a hand and pushed it back towards him with a stammering statement of, "No, no, no. I believe you now. Mac N Cheese kiddy pool. Not-that-sexy Nazgul. Definitely happened."

"They could have at least put on something other than Nickelback," Dason muttered.

"I DON'T NEED TO KNOW ANY MORE, DASON!" Oriole said as she threw her hands up in exasperation.

Dason took his soda in hand and mimed sipping it as if he were a certain felt frog drinking tea with the caption "But that's none of my business." He still took a drink. The action added to the eldritch space displacement was somehow even more unsettling.

Oriole let out a sigh and said, "Fuck it. We can go to my place today. Or at least as long as it takes for maintenance to do their job... or whatever it is they need to do."

She stood up and started to throw away her trash as she muttered, "Probably call in a HazMat team..."

Dason stood up with her, finishing the rest of his bun in a single bite. "We don't have to if you don't want to," Dason said as they walked towards the train station.

"Dason," Oriole said firmly, "I don't agree to come over all the time because I like your place or I like your stuff. To tell the truth, it kind of gets on my nerves that your place is so nice. I like coming over because I enjoy spending time with you..." she cleared her throat and added, "Weird as you are."

Heaven forbid that she express a positive sense of emotion towards him, Dason noted, though he was smiling behind his mask.

"So, are you going to come along or not?" Oriole said as she stuffed her hands in her pockets and began moving towards the train station.

Dason only then realized that he had stopped moving and that he had to take off at a short trot in order to catch up.

As they descended down into the station, Dason looked up at the clouds and saw that they were heavy, black, and pendulous, and looked ready to burst at any moment.

"That might dampen our spirits," Dason said, and Oriole shot him a cold stare.

"Did you just make a shitty pun?"

Dason stared back at her and tried to play it off. "Unintentionally," he replied.

Oriole squinted at him suspiciously, as if she didn't quite believe the words coming out of his mouth, then turned back down the escalator.

The clouds started to open up with a light drizzle as they stepped out of the station, and Dason flipped up the hood of his jacket so he could glance around.

This was not a good part of town.

Oriole had been very clear about the fact that she lived on the wrong side of the tracks on account of Grizz constantly cutting her pay for bullshit reasons, but this was a whole different can of worms. Dason felt like the railroad station was at the corner of Dead Cop and Prostitute Junction.

Oriole didn't say anything as she started to walk down the block. She moved like she belonged here, and people didn't pester them as they went down the street.

"Wish I brought an umbrella..." she muttered.

"Would you have handed it to me and said 'It's dangerous to go alone: Take this'?" Dason said.

Oriole just stared.

Right. They hadn't gotten to the Zelda games yet.

"Sorry. We could do that one next. I think you'll like it," Dason replied with a shrug.

Oriole turned her gaze back towards the sidewalk ahead, and she picked up her pace as the rain started to come down a little heavier.

Dason kept up, and they soon stopped at a shoddy, run-down apartment building, and Oriole unlocked the front door with one key from a ring before she pushed it open with mild effort and ducked inside.

The tile was cracked, the banister leading up to the next floors was splintered, and an old anemone lady with a glass eye and the skeleton of a clownflish living in her tentacles poked her head out of the door.

"Oriole," she said, and her voice rasped like a jagged piece of card stock across a chalkboard, "Do you have your rent?"

"I paid you on Friday, Ms. Svedka," Oriole said with a long-suffering sigh. "I know you cashed the check already."

Ms. Svedka nodded and started to close the door before Oriole hollered at her, "Hopefully you can put some of it to getting the damn elevator fixed!"

If Ms. Svedka heard, she didn't acknowledge it, and she closed the door before throwing the deadbolt and sliding the security chain in place.

Dason could tell by the set of her mouth and the fact that she was grinding her beak that Oriole wanted to mutter some very foul things about her landlady, and she made her way to the staircase.

"Hope you're not too tired to come up to the ninth floor," Oriole said as she started trotting up the stairs.

Dason didn't say anything and followed.

During that climb he _experienced_ things. A half-drunk inkling with a beard so thick that he could have hidden another forty in it, the sounds of a couple having very loud sex, the sounds of another couple getting in a very verbal and potentially physical argument, a literal street urchin curled up in a ball at the end of one hallway with a blanket pulled tight around him in order to escape from the chill and the rain.

Oriole ignored it all. For Dason, this was the first time that he could recall seeing and hearing so many people down on their luck in the same place at the same time. 

For Oriole, it was Tuesday.

Dason was bordering on slightly winded when they got to the ninth floor, and he was almost tempted to take off his gas mask just so he could fucking breathe a little easier.

Concealment was a benefit that came with limited range of vision and a filter that felt like he was breathing through a swizzle stick on a bad day.

Oriole didn't stop until she got to apartment 919, turned the key and pushed on the door.

It didn't budge.

Oriole grumbled some things under her breath and put some more muscle into opening the door, then slammed her shoulder into the part furthest away from the hinges, and there was a groaning creak as ill-fitted door slid against warped frame to push inwards.

She stepped in and Dason followed, and even as she took off her vest and hoodie to toss them into a corner that would have been a perfect place for a hat rack, Dason looked around.

To put it lightly, the place was a dump. He didn't mention anything because Oriole admitted as much, but he glanced around behind his mask and tried not to look around obviously.

There were splinters in the floorboards, cracks in the plaster of the wall, and Oriole had set up a bucket that was nearly full underneath a part of the cieling that was already dripping as the deluge continued.

For the most part, the lightbulbs were uncovered, and they cast a pale glow about the apartment while still making shadows in several corners.

For a brief moment, a tiny, elitist voice in the back of Dason's mind (for an obvious reason, it sounded like Kamila) rose up and asked, "Why the hell I did agree to come here? This place looks like shit."

Dason metaphorically grabbed a broom and proceeded to use it to beat the Kamila-gremlin still residing in his brain despite all of his efforts to expunge it.

He took off his shoes and paused for a moment before he removed his mask. He had the feeling that nobody except Ms. Svedka would come in, and he set his mask on the arm of one of the few pieces of furniture in the place. The couch was shabby, true, and needed to be upholstered again, but it was intact, and was surprisingly cozy as Dason sat down on it.

Furthermore, it was clean.

Everything was neatly ordered and dust-free, despite the fact that the apartment building was practically a flophouse, and everything seemed to be in its proper place.

Not that there was much to put in a proper place to begin with. There was a couch, a small folding table set off to one side with a folding chair that was close to the kitchen, and a wire-frame shelf that held a rather large (and presumably heavy) CRT television.

"Can I get you something to drink?" Oriole asked as she kicked off her own shoes and made her way back towards the pale fluorescent light that marked the kitchen.

"Just water, please," Dason said.

For a brief moment, Dason caught Oriole sending a short, sly glance to the bucket of water on the floor next to the small tile area marking the kitchen before she picked it up and dumped it in the sink before she replaced it so her downstairs neighbors didn't have to face the same issue she did.

She took out a pair of mismatched cups and filled them from the tap. It was telling that she let the water run for a good ten seconds before she began filling one cup, then tasted it before she filled them both brought them over.

She handed Dason one cup, and he set it aside without taking a drink.

"You have a-" he started to say before Oriole cut him off.

"It's a dump," she said, forestalling any attempts at politeness regarding her abode.

Dason stared at her for a second, then started to chuckle. "Well, it's definitely cleaner than mine is at the moment. What with all of the-"

She cut him off again, "I really don't want to know, Dason. Can we never talk about it again?"

He nodded in agreement, though a smile still graced his lips. Little did he realize that the whole mac-n-cheez-kiddy-pool-nazgul-accompanied-by-Nickelback incident would come back to haunt him yet again in a way that he couldn't possibly avoid.

In the moment, though, Dason sat there, staring at the blank CRT screen, not sure how to break the ice in this sort of situation. Oriole didn't have much in the way of diversions in the way that he did, and there was a distinct deficit of anything to talk about otherwise, aside from work.

He now realized that the room was starting to feel distinctly stuffy due to a combination of the outside humidity and the distinct lack of fans in the ceiling or otherwise to provide some sort of cooling.

This place had to be murder in the summer.

"Do you mind if I crack a window or two?" Dason asked.

"More so than they already are?" Oriole said dryly.

Only now did Dason realize that every window in immediate view had at least one crack, chip, or dent to mar its surface. He winced.

"Let me grab a couple of paper towels. Ms. Svedka has been getting on us about water damage..." she said as she stood up and went back to the kitchen nook to retrieve the items from under the sink.

Dason carefully slid a couple of windows open and the same smell that only a rain-soaked city could provide wafted in through the windows.

In some places, rain smells good. Most places, to be honest. Surprisingly, this was one of them. The street below was cracked and rough enough that the water was able to seep into the dirt below and release that sweet, tangy smell of petrichor that one usually associates with deserts. Even as Dason carefully opened up the first window, the stuffy air washed right out and was replaced by the cool air of the autumn rainstorm.

Zapfish bless the laws of thermodynamics.

Oriole came over with a couple of paper towels and a handful of stones and handed a mess of the first and two of the second to Dason. "Weigh them down at the corners so the wind doesn't blow them off. I learned that the hard way."

Dason followed her instructions and saw that, despite the screen, the first layer of towels was quickly becoming soaked. It must have really been coming down out there.

Oriole returned from presumably doing the same to the other windows around the apartment, and flopped onto the couch again.

She dispassionately sipped at her water, and an old human image cropped up in his mind.

He didn't recognize the characters, but that stupid brain gremlin voiced by surprise guest speaker Kamila rose up again with the caption.

"Shit, bitch. You live like this?"

Dason beat the cranial imp back into its cave of stupidity and did his best to seal the entrance... at least for the night.

He sat down on the couch with her and folded one leg over the other. Somehow, he got the feeling that the couch was the only thing that was comfortable about the apartment, to say nothing of the situation.

"Do you want to watch TV?" Oriole asked, and Dason was thankful that she initiated it.

"Sure," he replied. He probably knew that she didn't have much in the way of channels, but it would at least be something to fill the silence.

She flicked on the TV, and they had to scoot a little closer to one another so they could both get a decent view of the old-school tube TV, and she flipped to a channel running an old human sitcom called "Comrades" where six people invariably found themselves in the same apartment day after day and rarely interacted with other people outside of it.

It wasn't the most interesting show, but the other options were the news (which was invariably infuriating), and "paid programming."

Given the choice between the two, Dason was pretty sure that Oriole would have picked the news, on account of the "paid programming" being little more than thirty-minute-long commercials where they introduced new deals every five minutes.

In a variety of shows, this place would not be a fit place to live. In fact, to some people, it might have very well violated the laws of common decency. Dason had seen apartments like this in spy dramas, where someone had to go to a safehouse and lay low until the law passed them by, not unlike a certain author having to hide for weeks on end in order to evade police that perhaps-not-wrongfully wanted to arrest him on charges of forgery and disturbing the peace.

It was an incredibly awkward situation, especially considering the hunched set of Oriole's shoulders and how she seemed to be staring at the TV with an almost furious intent, as if she was incensed at how people could have that many friends and that nice of an apartment.

Dason swallowed at the second thought.

Fortunately, at that moment, there was a flash of lightning, a rumble of thunder, and the power went out all at once, including a pop and a whiff of ozone from the TV.

"Son of a protestant whore..." Oriole muttered under her breath in the darkness. There was barely any light from the windows, since they were way above streetlight limit, but Dason could still see her shadow as she rose up and walked towards the kitchen.

She spoke a little louder as she blindly rummaged in a couple of the drawers. "Third time the CRT has blown out since I moved in here... I have a spare around here somewhere, but I won't be able to replace it until the power's back on."

Oriole straightened up and glanced around. "Mainly because I don't have lights."

Dason couldn't help but let out a dry chuckle at that.

He got blasted in the face with a high-power flashlight for his trouble.

"For that, you're going to find the candles. I have matches in here, and I can feel my way around, so you're taking this."

The light got brighter and brighter as she approached and eventually stuffed it into his hands.

"Um..." Dason said, somewhat unsure, "Where are they?"

"Go down the corridor," Oriole said as she went back into the dark kitchen, "On the left is the bathroom, the right is my bedroom. In the closet, there should be a box of candles. Just bring the whole damn box out."

Dason was being sent into a girl's room with nothing more than a flashlight and instructions. Some people would consider this a dream, but he thought the situation more fitting of a survivial horror game... especially considering how she was at Grizzco.

He turned down the hallway and shone the flashlight on the cracked-paint door on the right, then turned the knob.

Zapfish above, the door fucking _creaked_.

Dason had a feeling that he was going to encounter a Babadook or some other evil ghost-type motherfucker in this room.

But the room was as Spartan as could be.

A single mattress lay in one corner of the room with a heavy blanket and two pillows, and a stack of neatly folded laundry in the corner across from it.

Dason quickly shifted the light away so he didn't see too many of Oriole's unmentionables, and shone the light on the opposite corner from her clothes.

A bag, presumably for the dirty clothes, sat on the floor, almost full to bursting. Behind it was a closet door.

"So, uh..." Dason asked as he eased his way towards the door. "How do you know how to repair TVs?"

"A neighbor taught me," Oriole called from the kitchen. Dason was slowly easing his way across the floor towards the closet. Despite the way that his life had run up to this point, he suddenly got the feeling that he was in Forgetful: The Cruel Cascade or some other game of that variety.

He really needed to stop playing those games before bed.

Oriole continued, "When plasma screens got big, he was out of a job, and he moved in next door. There's a pretty big market for parts, and he showed me how to replace some of them. Taught me a couple of other things, too."

"Sounds like the kind of thing that needs steady hands," Dason said, and he did everything he could to stop his voice from shaking. It worked. Mostly.

Oriole gave a laugh that sounded a little forced, "Yeah. I think that's why I was so good at the claw games at the arcade."

Dason gave his own forced laugh in return and eased the closet open, ready to jump back in case something jumped out screaming.

It was a normal closet.

A couple of jackets (one for each kind of weather) hung from the rack, and there were a couple of boxes scattered across the floor.

"Which box is it?" Dason asked, relieved and booting himself for being so foolish as to think that something dark and unspeakable would be hiding in his friend's closet.

"Should be second one from the left," Oriole called back.

He was on the wrong side of the closet. He moved over to the other side, and as he did, he caught a glimpse of rope on the floor inside.

One door closed, another opened, and he shone his light across the floor to find the box he desired.

It was a small thing, and he saw a coil of rope going underneath it to lift it slightly off the ground, just a little off-kilter.

It was probably nothing.

He plucked the box up off the ground as he held the flashlight under one arm, and the light shone directly onto what was underneath.

It was distinctly something.

The knot had to be something that took a little time and practice to make, since it was as immaculate as one saw in the movies. There was a brief disconnect between Dason seeing it and realizing what it was, mainly because he'd never seen one in person before.

"Having a bit of a hard time in there?" Oriole called.

"Just a second," Dason called, and his voice quavered only slightly. "It's wedged in there a little tight."

"Need a hand?" Oriole said, and Dason heard the floorboards creaking as she started to make her way over to him. Based on how they sounded, they must have been made of three thousand year-old whale scrotum.

"I'm good," he replied, and his voice was steadier as he set the box down and reached out for the noose. It was heavier than he expected, and the rope slid easily through the knot. He didn't know what was more terrifying: The fact that it existed in the first place, or that it had clearly been made with enough care to work the way it was supposed to.

Oriole poked her head into the room as she said, "I know I have a lot of boxes in there but-"

Dason looked at her, the noose in his hands, and they both froze.

He turned towards her as if to explain, and the light illuminated her fully as he did. He expected to see rage, fury, fear, on her face.

Instead, her expression just looked as carefully neutral as it could have been.

"Put that back when you're done, Dason," she said, and the ice in her voice was cold enough to kill nerve endings.

With that, she left.

Dason stared back and forth between the empty doorway and what he held in his hands. However, despite what she said, he did not put it back where it belonged. He coiled the rope around the knot so it formed a heavy lump, and tucked it into the pocket of his hoodie.

He wasn't going to just put it back. Not when he now realized what it might be used for.

He took the box of candles out into the kitchen nook where Oriole waited, and she began to take them out one by one, light them with a quick flick of a gas-station lighter, then give very-curt instructions as to where they were supposed to go.

Dason obliged wordlessly, taking them and setting them in the directed spots so they slowly illuminated the apartment to make it look like a place where a cult might perform a summoning or even an old-timey wizard's tower that just happened to be missing a few books.

When enough candles were lit, Dason took a seat on the couch close to his gas mask, and Oriole sat on the far end away from him.

It pained him that she didn't want to be close, but he didn't know if there was any way to bridge the gap, especially considering what he currently had nestled in his pocket.

Rain hammered down outside. Within the apartment, silence reigned.

Dason broke it with only a simple question.

"Why?"

Oriole was silent for a long time.

She stared at one of the candle's flames as if she could extinguish it with her gaze, and spoke quietly. The light did nothing to make her face seem more inviting.

"I want to die."

Dason blinked. It was all he could do.

"I don't want to be on this planet anymore," Oriole continued, as if she hadn't heard.

Dason opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it and quashed the thought.

"I've been waiting, you know? I've been waiting for the moment, the single breaking point, and I've had that rope ready. The day when someone spits on me for being an octoling, the day that Grizz completely docks my pay. I told myself that those would be the days that I would do it, and there are a few others."

She turned her gaze to face him and gave a smile that seemed so sad, so terrifying, so absolutely broken that he couldn't comprehend its depths fully.

"The world doesn't want me anymore. I'm unwelcome here. I just want an excuse to do what the world wants.

"I just... miss so much, Dason," she said as her expression shifted back to the candle flame. He watched her with a growing... something in his belly, but didn't want to comment on the matter.

"I miss being a kid. I miss not knowing what the world wanted of me, _expected_ of me, and now that I know..." she gave a dry, mirthless chuckle. "I'm not sure if I can handle it."

Dason stared. He didn't have anything to say, and his scar itched, but he forcibly suppressed the urge to scratch at it. She spoke about this as casually as one would mention the Turf War stages for the day, as if it was an inevitabilty and that there was nothing that someone could do in order to change it.

He wanted to vomit.

Instead, he firmed his mouth in a line, and he knew that, even in that light, his expression had to be bloodless.

His hand clamped down on the gas mask hard enough to crack one of the lenses, and he tied it back onto his face.

"Do you have to go?" Oriole asked, her expression never wavering.

"Yes," he said, and his voice was as hard as freshly-tempered steel.

"Okay," Oriole said, and her voice seemed distant, almost on another plane of existence. Dason repressed a shudder as he considered the atmosphere and the expression on Oriole's face. She looked like a ghost still walking, and he didn't want to think about that in the slightest.

"I'll see you tomorrow," Oriole said as she looked back to the flame in front of the blown-out TV.

Dason nodded in agreement. With the noose in his pocket, he could at least guarantee that.


	15. Chapter 15

"What do you want?"

"I need a favor"

"You finally get in touch with me after all this time, and you ask for a _favor_?!"

"Can you help me or not."

"I don't know if I want to. I've rarely seen hide or hair of you since you left, and now you call me up for _this_?"

"It's important."

"And I'm not?"

"I never said that."

"It definitely seems like it."

"Someone's life hangs in the balance, here."

"... Is this you being weird, or are you being serious?"

"I'm going to ignore the comment about me being weird and instead focus on the other part: Yes. I'm being serious."

"I don't know... You've always been weird."

"Focus."

"Why is this so important?"

"This life means as much to me as yours does, and you saw what happened the last time yours was put at risk."

"..."

"Will you help me or not?"

"I don't know if I should. If I can."

"You can, I know that much. Whether or not you should is entirely up to you. You're the only person I can trust to do this."

"... You've got some nerve, you know that?"

"I take that means you'll do it."

"Yeah. Under one condition."

"That is?"

"Full details. Everything you can remember."

"Deal. But in time."

"You're making it really hard for me to agree to this."

"I've told you that you're the only person that I can rely on, I've promised you what you want when I can give it to you. What more do you want?"

"Come on..."

"Do you want me to beg? Because for this, I'll get down on my knees and plant my forehead to the pavement."

"Now you're being dramatic."

"Try me. See if I'm not."

"... Wow. You're really serious about this, aren't you?"

"I told you I was. Last time someone I cared about had their life on the line, I was focused on retribution. This time, I want to think about prevention."

"..."

"So can you swing it or not?"

"... I'll do it. What do you need?"


	16. Chapter 16

**Dason:** Now listen here.

He was sure that this could be taken the wrong way, but he was determined to see how it would play out.

 **Oriole:** dason if this is about the other day  
 **Oriole:** im not taking back anything i said  
 **Oriole:** i meant every word

He wasn't going to budge on this.

 **Dason:** Now listen to me, young lady.  
 **Dason:** I am talking directly into your ear now.  
 **Dason:** I need you to do this for me. You will do this for me.  
 **Dason:** I need you to start packing an overnight bag.  
 **Dason:** Two changes of clothes if you have them.  
 **Dason:** I need you to have as much cash as you can stuff in your wallet in as large bills as you can find.  
 **Dason:** You will do this for me or else there will be very dire consequences.

An uncomfortably long silence passed before Dason got a response.

 **Oriole:** Dason, you're scaring me.

Dason couldn't suppress a grin as he knocked on the door of her apartment building with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

 **Dason:** Too late. Get ready. Ms. Svedka will only delay me for a little while.

Speak of the devil and she shall appear. The door cracked open slightly, and Oriole's landlady peered out with a suspicious expression.

Dason put on the most cheerful expression he could under the mask. Just for added effect, he tilted his head in a positive manner, "Ms. Svedka! I'm here to pick up Oriole, but she must not have heard me buzz. Could I come in?"

Ms. Svedka's eyes narrowed even further. "Depends. Has she paid her rent?"

"To that I ask: Have you repaired the elevator?"

Ms. Svedka started to close the door. Dason put his foot in and, for good measure, readied a screwdriver so he could use it to remove the end of the chain from its housing should worst come to worst (it was a trick that Koi had taught him).

"Ma'am," Dason said politely. "When I came over last week, Oriole said that she had paid the rent three days before, and I doubt that ten days makes a month."

"Take your foot out of the door," Ms. Svedka said after a moment. The dead fish in her hair jostled slightly as she spoke. "I'll let you in."

Dason removed his foot as she requested, and the door closed enough for her to remove the security chain before she opened it wide.

"Thank you, Ma'am," Dason said. For a moment, he thought that the old anemone blushed.

Well, he'd buttered her up a little bit, so it couldn't hurt to be a little more kind.

"Also, as long as I'm here, an advance on Oriole's rent. She forgot to pick it up from Grizzco yesterday."

The envelope he pressed into Ms. Svedka's hands was probably enough for two months rent at this flophouse, and he didn't doubt that only just enough to cover Oriole's rent would be applied as such while the rest went into the landlady's pocket.

Even so, she smiled like a kindly grandmother and said, "Bless you, dearie. Can I get you a cup of tea while you wait for her?"

Dason, despite his expecations, was surprised at just how much money could talk. He never expected that a borderline Scrooge-esque old lady could display a semblance of kindness.

"Thank you for the offer, Ma'am," he said, still displaying the proper amount of respect that would normally be due to someone in her position, "However, we have a train to catch, and I need to go and get Oriole before we miss it."

"Of course, dear," Ms. Svedka said, smiling in a way that would make honey seem sour (somehow, it didn't seem forced. This woman's powers were not to be underestimated). "Next time you swing by, do tell if there's anything I can do to help you."

Dason doubted the idea was sincere, but the pat that she gave to Dason's rear as he started towards the stairs made him consider a potentially mortifying alternative.

He climbed the stairs at his own pace, that way he wasn't out of breath by the time that he reached Oriole's floor.

Dason knocked lightly on the door, and was immediately greeted by a shout of "WHO IS IT?!"

"The ghost of Squidsmas Past. I warned you I was coming," Dason replied.

Oriole was silent for a moment.

"Are you here to kidnap me?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes," Dason said. He was still formal from his brush with the landlady, but he figured it could work in his favor.

"I'm locking the door," Oriole said. "I know you took my... effects."

The way she phrased it, it would sound like he'd conducted a panty raid on her to casual passerby. But the two of them knew what she meant.

"Oriole," he said with a sigh, "I'm not going to apologize for what I did, and I'm not going to apologize for what I'll have to do if you make me come in there."

Oriole didn't say anything for a good while before she unlocked the door and peered out through the crack that the security chain would allow.

"What would you have to do?"

"You know what I told you I did with my mask?" Dason said.

"Yeah?..." Oriole replied, though there was confusion and hesitance in her voice.

"Picture I can do that not only with the end of your security chain, but also with your deadbolt."

Oriole stared at him.

This was a bluff, of course, but he wasn't going to tell her that. He honestly doubted that he would have been able to do such a thing if he tried, but she didn't know the extent of his weird.

Oriole closed the door and undid the chain.

Dason tested the door and poked his head in. It was a surefire way to ruin a perfectly good gas mask, especially since he had replaced the cracked lens after the last time he was here, but Oriole wasn't on the other side of the door.

Instead, she was walking back towards her room, presumably to ready an overnight bag.

"So what do you have in mind?" Oriole asked as she crossed the way from her bedroom to the bathroom.

"Something," Dason said.

"You're being confusing on purpose."

"That's the reason behind a surprise, yes."

"I'm not sure that it is."

Dason set down his bag, removed his mask, then beamed at her. It did weird things to his scarring, or at least it felt weird, but she didn't display any emotion one way or another.

She was wearing a white shirt with a big letter "T" on it, and a pair of shorts as she walked around her apartment. The place was stuffy enough to warrant such clothing given the cool weather outside.

Then again, Dason had checked the forecast for where they were going, and the clothes that she wore would be perfectly seasonable, especially considering the fact that the executives had gone out of their way to forcibly change the weather so it would be "perfect" year round.

Oriole soon came out of her room wearing a black hoodie, jeans, and her usual cap, as well as a scowl on her face. "You're doing something shady."

"Nope," Dason chirped as he held the door open for her, "All of my intentions are pure."

Once they were both outside, Oriole forced the door shut enough so she could lock the door, then made her way downstairs at a clip and expected him to follow.

"Then where are we going?" she asked.

"That's a surprise," Dason replied.

Oriole frowned at that. "Shady," she said.

When they got to the first floor, Ms. Svedka was right there waiting for them. Dason could hear Oriole's blood run cold.

"Oriole!" she said cheerily, "I've put in the work order for the elevator. They should be here within a week. Hopefully that will be soon enough for you, dear."

Oriole was clearly shaken by the prospect, and she nodded slowly. "Thanks, Ms. Svedka. Um... I'll probably be gone for a couple of days, but I sent in the rent almost two weeks ago."

"No worry, dear. No worry," Ms. Svedka replied as she beamed at the pair. "I know your rent is paid. I remember giving you the receipt. Either way, you two enjoy yourselves on your vacation, okay?"

"O...kay?" Oriole said, though the statement was more agreement than confusion.

"Fine young man you have there," Ms. Svedka said as she bustled the two over to the door and let them out, "Very fine. Don't get into too much trouble!"

As she closed the door behind them, Oriole shot Dason a look, then said plainly, "You brainwashed her."

Dason started and faltered in his step enough to trip over a crack in the pavement before he said, "What?"

"She's never been that nice to me before. What did you do?"

Dason wasn't going to mention the money, though he had a feeling that the landlady's kindness went beyond that. "I... called her ma'am and was respectful?"

Oriole straightened up at that. "Makes sense," she said.

"What does?"

"Every time Nikolas Plomari, the handyman, comes by, she acts the exact same way," Oriole explained.

Dason tilted his head as Oriole shifted her gaze back to him.

"Niko is maybe five years older than us and you could wash laundry on his abs."

Oh.

Oh no.

Dason had to wrestle with the fact that a borderline septuagenarian found him attractive as they boarded the train to the outer edges of Inkopolis, and he continued to wrestle with it until the train's intercom dinged and said "Next stop: Wahoo World."

Oriole glared at him.

"What did you do?"

Dason looked over at her, not comprehending that the next stop was theirs. "What?"

"What. Did you do?"

Dason put his hands up in protest, "I was minding my own business!"

"Bullshit!"

"I was!" Dason practically whined, attracting unwanted attention from several people seated near them.

"And what part of 'minding your own business' brings us to Wahoo World?!"

Dason sat up ramrod straight and said, as if he was completely disregarding their previous conversation, "Oh, that's our stop."

"Dason!"

Dason didn't listen as he lead the way off the train, much to Oriole's hollering and the discontent of the other train passengers.

"Dason, you get your ass back here, otherwise I'm going to break my foot off in it!"

Dason quickened his pace slightly.

"Dason!"

He rounded a corner and began trotting up the stairs out of the train station. Oriole followed him and spewed a stream of curses that, if they were said inside the confines of the park, would probably cause Faustus the Fresh Fish, the Wahoo World Mascot, to snipe her from atop the giant golf-ball looking thing in the center of the park.

He stopped once he got to the top of the stairs, and Oriole's curses died out in her throat as her expression changed to one of awe. "Holy fucking shit," she said.

Wahoo World was every squid kid's dream trip, with a good portion of it sprawled on a massive boardwalk with several layers. To one side of the boardwalk was an area with several rides, including a panoply of roller coasters that already had people screaming in fear and excitement on them. The other side extended out into the sea and was a sprawl of water slides and other watery attractions.

"Holy fucking shit," Oriole said again. "I'd only seen this place in commercials. This is the first time I'm seeing it in person."

"Well, you're going to see a lot more of it," Dason said as he started to walk in a direction that was not towards Wahoo World.

"Wait, where are you going?!"

"We have to check in."

"CHECK IN?!"

"Yeah. I got us two-day passes. You think that we're just going to walk around with our bags in the park, especially when they charge an arm and a leg to rent a locker for even an hour?" he asked chidingly. "Get a clue, Oriole. Jeez."

Oriole glowered as they walked. A little more than two blocks deeper into the city, they were far enough away from the undisclosed technology that kept the park and the surrounding area a balmy seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit that they were able to feel the chill of the late autumn air.

And they were standing in front of a building that looked like it had been plucked straight from what most people thought of when they imagined Italy, a palazzo that went up five stories into the air on three sides, and a plaza that had everything ranging from a pizza place to a Starfishbucks to a cigar shop.

Oriole didn't stop gaping, and Dason didn't ask her to. This kind of sight was a lot to take in when you first saw it, so he figured he might as well let her just soak it all up.

They walked into the reception hall, and Dason walked up to the desk and casually rang the bell even though there was an associate sitting right there.

"Sorry," Dason said with a shrug that indicated he really wasn't. "Every time I see one of those, I have to ding it."

"You are such a child," Oriole sighed. Behind the desk, though, the inkling working the computer had a very different opinion of him.

"Oh don't worry," she said. A nametag on her breast read "Carlita." "I sometimes ring it when I'm alone, and it always makes my coworkers come running. What's the name of the reservation?"

"Should be under 'Stormbringer,'" Dason explained, "Though if not, it's under 'Brook.'"

Oriole gave him a sidelong glance. He could hear the gears turning in her head, though he knew that she wasn't piecing the whole story together just yet.

"Right... Mr... Dason Stormbringer?" Carlita said.

"That would be me, yes," Dason said with a nod.

"Right..." Carlita said as she narrowed her eyes at the screen, "Under normal circumstances, I'd ask for ID, but the Wahoo Entertainment Family card number is a platinum member, so I'll not give you a hard time about it."

Dason could hear the question marks popping up over Oriole's head beside him. Her expression was twisting more and more into a hilarious combination of outrage and confusion.

He had to resist the urge not to chuckle.

"Two room keys, then?" Carlita said as she tapped a couple of keys on the computer.

"Please," Dason said.

"Right," she replied as she slid the keycards across the counter. "We have you set up in room 314. If there's anything you need, Mr. Stormbringer, please don't hesitate to call the front desk. Checkout is two days from now at noon."

"Thank you, Carlita," Dason said as he took the keys and passed one to Oriole as they left the reception desk, and she kept staring at him in a state of absolute confusion as they walked towards the elevator.

Once they were inside the elevator with the doors closed, Oriole asked only a single, quiet question: "What the fuck."

"Hm?" Dason said as he turned towards her.

"What the fucking fuck, Dason."

"I called in a favor," he explained casually.

"Must have been some favor," Oriole said as the elevator dinged and let them out onto the third floor.

"Considering who I called? No. I think that they would have done this for me if I asked nicely anyways."

"Did you ask nicely?"

Dason shot her a look that spoke volumes. Volume one was entitled "You Think That Little of Me?" by Dason Stormbringer.

Apparently she got the gist even through the mask, because all she did was shrug and keep walking.

He swiped the key to their room and stepped inside. It was pleasantly cool, about the same temperature as what they could expect from Wahoo World, and he stopped dead once he saw the bed.

Singular.

Oriole saw it too and said only, "If this is you trying to be slick..."

"It's not," Dason replied.

Of course Vale wouldn't have convinced Kamila to book a room with two beds. That would have been way too sketchy.

"I'll take the chair," Dason said as he tossed his duffel onto a large easy chair. "You can have the bed."

Oriole didn't argue. She only took her bag and set it on the bed before opening it and rummaging through.

"We'll want to change into warm-weather clothes," Dason explained as he retrieved a change from his duffel. The cold would be murder as they walked to and from the park, but he would perservere.

"Yeah," Oriole agreed as she laid out a t-shirt and a pair of oversized jorts. Dason questioned her for a moment, but then remembered Valentina's laments about not finding enough clothes in her size with pockets.

"I'll change in the bathroom," Dason said as he went in that direction. "And I'll ask if you're decent before coming out."

"Thank you," Oriole said as he closed the door behind him.

He changed quickly and efficiently into a pair of white jeans and a lime-green shirt with a yellow rooster on it, followed by the letter "Y".

Valentina had got it for him as a joke gift, but he loved it.

He put his shoes back on, readjusted his gas mask, and knocked quietly on the door before saying, "I'm respecting your privacy by knocking but asserting my authority as the person that engineered this whole thing by coming in anyways."

"No!" Oriole shouted as Dason started to creak open the door. He closed it and snickered loud enough for her to hear.

"You're an ass," Oriole said after a moment, "I'm decent."

Dason stepped out to the sight of Oriole pulling her shoes on. Her shirt said only "Booyah" in incredibly stylized graffiti print, and she left her hat on top of her bag.

He returned to his bag and retrieved an aerosol can of sunblock, blasted himself with it, then passed it to Oriole with the command, "Grease up."

Oriole stared at him, then sprayed her arms, legs, neck, then a little into her hand before she rubbed it into her face. "We only need the one room key, right?" she asked.

"Bring yours," he said.

"What? Why?"

"You'll see," he said, then held the door open for her.

Dason almost died from the cold on the walk back to Wahoo World, to the point where he had to stretch once they got back to the zone of warm air so he could ease up any stiffness he'd accumulated on the way.

Once they got their tickets and stepped inside, Dason looked at Oriole to see her expression.

"Wow," she said as she looked around at the colorful mayhem that dotted the landscape. Faustus was getting pictures with a few kids, and there were merch shops on both sides as they made their way deeper into the park.

"So," Dason said. "Where do you want to start?"

"I... don't know," Oriole replied. "Where should we start?"

"A couple of rides, then a bite to eat?" he suggested.

"I think I can do that," Oriole replied, still not taking her eyes off the scenery.

He had to gingerly take her hand and start walking before she fell into step.

It was just to get her moving. Nothing else. "I only want to get further into the park so we can get away from the crowd," he thought to himself.

You know. Like a liar.

He let her hand go reluctantly as they got closer to one of the rides. It was something usually intended for small children, but Dason figured it would be a good place to start... especially since he didn't know how long it had been since Oriole had been on a ride of any kind.

"Teacups?" he asked.

Oriole stared at him, then at the ride with a sense of confusion. "What?"

"You want to ride them?"

"What does it do?" Oriole asked.

"There's a wheel in the middle. You turn it, you spin, all the while everything else is spinning too."

"That sounds like a ride for kids."

Dason stared at her and said, "Bet you can't spin the cup half as fast as I can."

Oriole's expression turned into that competitive one he'd seen on her several times before, and she said, "Oh, you're on."

Once they were in the teacup and the ride started, their hands began moving around the wheel to get them spinning at top speed.

Dason was pretty sure that he heard something break under his feet, and they only kept on going faster.

Maybe the thing that he thought heard break was the limiter underneath the teacup. Maybe he was wrong. Who knows.

Apparently it was, because they didn't stop spinning when the rest of the ride did, and Oriole's determined expression didn't slow down as she kept on trying to crank the wheel.

It wasn't adding any speed, but the brakes were definitely off.

After a fashion, it wasn't just the people working the ride that stopped to watch, but several coworkers from nearby stands and rides as well.

Dason just kept on staring at her as she continued to try and crank the wheel, but felt them slowing down bit by bit.

Mainly because there was a worker with a mop that was prodding the side of the teacup to slow them down a little quicker.

The workers helped Oriole and Dason out, both of them stumbling with dizziness. Oriole staggered her way over to the railing and clamped her hands down before she said, "I win."

In Dason's mind, both of them won.

Once they had their equilibrium back, they began walking along in the general direction of food. This path just so happened to take them nearby a Ferris Wheel.

"Can we go on that one too?" Oriole asked as she pointed at it.

"You can," Dason said with a shrug. "I'm not the biggest fan of ferris wheels."

"Okay," Oriole said a little sadly before she made her way over to the line.

Dason watched her go, then paused for a moment. Looking at the ferris wheel, there wasn't even so much as a lap bar to keep the riders in place. Just a little door and a bench in the cart.

His mind shot back to the moment when Oriole said that she was just looking for an excuse, then his gaze went up to the top of the wheel, a full six stories off the ground.

He ducked into line alongside her, much to the chagrin of a family that was standing behind the pair, and stood there with his hands stuffed into his pockets.

Oriole stared for a moment, blinked twice, then said, "I thought you said you didn't like Ferris Wheels?"

"I changed my mind," Dason said simply.

To tell the truth, getting onto the wheel was actually a really good idea, because their vantage point allowed them to plot out a rough path towards the things that they wanted to do.

Once they were back on the ground, Oriole was practically skipping in the direction that they planned, turning around from time to time to tell Dason to hurry up.

The entire purpose of this trip had been to give her a reason to live. He wasn't sure how they were doing on that front, but he could at least tell that she was having fun.

They paused for a quick lunch at the massive food court that (inexplicably) had a medieval theme. Dason had a couple of sausages with brown mustard and mashed potatoes while Oriole devoured a smoked turkey leg in a way that made Dason afraid.

As she licked the last of the grease off her fingers while they walked, they passed under a roller coaster just as the cars went by.

Oriole ducked, thinking that people were going to fall off as they turned upside-down, then stared up at them in a combination of fear and awe.

"You ever been on a roller coaster?" Dason asked as they walked. He kept his hands in his pockets out of fear that he'd want to take her hand again.

"No," Oriole said.

"Do you want to?"

Oriole stared at him in abject terror.

"Come on," Dason said as he started towards the entry to the coaster in question, "It'll be fun."

When they got there, Oriole saw a sign that indicated how tall you had to be to ride. At her height, there was no way that she'd be able to use that as an excuse to get out of going on the coaster.

That didn't change the fact that there was a line of parents, children, and solo riders stretching almost to the sign itself.

"Well," Oriole said with a nervous laugh, "Guess we're not going on that one today. Maybe tomorrow?"

There was an unspoken note in her voice that said, "Or never."

"Nonsense," Dason said. He did take her hand again and said, "Get your room key ready."

They went straight to the lane that said "Fast Pass" and flashed their room keys. The security crab standing next to it in an unnecessarily colorful uniform nodded and waved them through.

Oriole stared at the room key, then back at Dason.

He only grinned at her from behind his mask. "The hotel we're staying at is a Wahoo World property. So we get to jump to the front of any line we want."

He heard Oriole swallow as they kept walking.

As opposed to what looked like a forty-five minute wait, they had to wait less than five minutes. For the front car, no less.

"It's your first time," Dason explained. "You have to do it in style."

The only issue was when the people working the ride attempted to make Dason take his mask off.

"Sir, you're going to need to remove your-"

"No."

That forestalled any further arguments.

Oriole blanched as they sat down in the car and pulled the shoulder harnesses in place.

With the harness in the way, Dason couldn't see Oriole's face as they started the steady "click click click click" up the first ramp, but he could see how her hands were white-knuckled on the harness.

They went down the first drop (a little tame, all things considered), and Dason threw up his hands while Oriole screamed.

It continued that way until they started to pull back into the station, and when the harnesses released, Dason looked over to see Oriole's tentacles sticking out every which way from the ride itself.

She was wordless as they left the station, and only spoke when they were back on the walkway between rides.

"So," Dason said as they started to walk down the street. Oriole was staring at her hands and how they shook. "What did you think."

As if awoken from a dream, Oriole looked up at Dason, then pointed over to another coaster. It was a massive beast, the first drop visible from anywhere within the park. It easily went up three times as high as the ferris wheel had, and twice as high as the one that they just rode.

It was also a drop almost straight down.

"That one," she said.

Dason blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Give me that one."

Dason grabbed the hand pointing at the coaster and dragged her right to it as quickly as he could, especially considering that he was about as hard as Chinese algebra.

She didn't even bother to readjust her tentacles as they ran towards the coaster, instead wearing a grin of unmitigated joy as they jumped in the fast pass lane and got in at the front once again.

He could feel her bouncing in her seat as they went up the ramp, a full two minutes to reach the top, and heard her letting out a scream of glee and defiance as they went down the first drop that took them under the ground and into a series of twists, turns, and loops.

"More," she said when they got off, her expression little more than mania. "I want more."

After that, it was nonstop coasters. She swung her legs on one of the dangling ones, her voice shook on a wooden coaster, but the best moment had to be her first experience with induction.

These weren't Dason's favorite, but he wanted her to experience the full range, so he made a note to keep his eyes closed and his head pressed back against the headrest.

They got onto a ride that was only called "EndZone" The car wheeled out and stopped dead, causing Oriole to look over at him in confusion.

"Dason?"

"Yeah?"

"Where's the-"

She was cut off by a set of lights beeping overhead, like a racetrack counting down to the start. After that, the coaster got kicked in the pants and launched them off at sixty miles an hour, with Oriole screaming in delight the entire time as they were launched almost vertically into the air, into a twist, and down in almost the exact same manner.

Dason regretted every moment, save the last. When they got off, Oriole was practically crowing, "That one was my favorite! Can we do it again?"

Dason regretted that even more.

He did not, however, regret the ever-present smile on her face as they made their way through the park and rode one ride after the other, her expression always one of joy and not of fear, despondence, or sorrow.

That was the point of this trip.

They rode several of the coasters more than once, including the first one that Oriole had demanded (called "The Brute" for obvious reasons), as well as the induction coasters, despite Dason's desire to lose his lunch at multiple points during the ride.

He called it quits before she did, much to her obvious dismay. Only then did she rearrange her tentacles into something that almost looked like she hadn't been blasted in the face with the tail end of a fanboat.

The sun was starting to set, and the lights of Wahoo World began to come on, with the coasters lit up in splashes of blue, green, and gold. His sights, however, were set on a completely different area.

"Let's head back to the boardwalk," Dason said as he started to trot away from the coasters, the exact opposite of what Oriole wanted him to do.

"What? No..." Oriole whined, but he wasn't hearing any of it.

The various levels of the boardwalk had restaurants and midway games, and it was the second that drew Dason's attention. "You ever play any of these?" he asked.

"They're probably rigged," Oriole said bitterly. He felt a little bad about dragging her away from the roller coasters, but he knew that half of the joy of a good coaster was being able to see what was coming before it happened, and nighttime was not a good opportunity for that.

"True," Dason said as they walked along past the various people in straw boater hats calling out, "Step right up, step right up!" and "Take your chance with Lady Luck!"

"That'll only make it more fun when you win, right?" Dason replied.

That made Oriole perk up slightly, and he knew that he could convince her to do a couple.

They tried a basketball game with undersized hoops and overinflated balls, a ring toss game where the rings flew the way that old people had sex (slowly and probably with a broken hip), but it was the darts game that Oriole excelled at.

It was a simple game: Pop balloons with darts. That's it.

Of course, the darts were weighted wrong, duller than an accountant's convention, and the balloons were underinflated to the point where a Bowie knife landing point-first in it would likely just pin the rubber to the backboard.

"Okay," Dason said as she took the darts in hand, "What you want to do is-"

"I know what I need to do," Oriole said, and her hand flickered three times for three darts. They each popped a balloon that had been shining on the outside, indicating that it had been blown up almost to capacity.

The poor carny stared at Oriole with an expression of shock, as if he was going to lose his job over this.

Honestly, considering the cutthroat world of boardwalk games, he very well might.

Shows you how much Dason knew about the world of carnies.

"I want that," Oriole said as she pointed at a very large Octillery plush that was dangling tantalizingly from the ceiling.

"Um... well..." the carny said as he adjusted his clip-on bowtie, "You have to win five matches in a row to get that one."

Oriole's eyes were harder than steel, and twice as cold. "Then blow up the balloons again, and get me the darts."

He obliged her. For a moment, Dason felt that chilly spire of fear run through his back, and she popped three more balloons the second that he was out of the way.  
"Again," she said calmly, and the carny obliged, not even bothering. Dason just kept on giving the man bills, and there weren't any words exchanged save for the simple phrase, "Again," after Oriole finished a round.

Five games, and she waltzed off with the massive Octillery plush. It was almost as big as she was, and she hugged it tight as they made their way further down the boardwalk.

Dason bought them some funnel cake, a couple of corndogs, and a bag of kettle corn to enjoy together before Oriole spoke up.

"I'm a little tired... can we go back to the hotel?" she asked.

Dason nodded in agreement. They'd been going full tilt in the park since almost eleven in the morning, and it was eight and a half hours later at the very least.

They walked back in the chill of the autumn evening, and Dason needed to at least rinse with warm water to heat himself back up once they were in their room. Once he was out, wearing a pair of basketball shorts and a clean white t-shirt, he said, "By the way."

"Hm?" Oriole looked up from where she was hugging her spoils of war on the bed.

"Did you bring a swimsuit? For the water park tomorrow." Dason asked as he took off his mask. He was wearing a wild grin of his own, not perverted in the slightest, and Oriole's gaze met his in a much colder confusion than she'd had when they checked in.

"A what now."


	17. Chapter 17

The morning was normal, all things considered. Dason woke up before Oriole, and he couldn't help but to smile at the way she was snuggled deep into the covers, curled in almost a fetal position.

She was snoring softly.

He suppressed the urge to audibly say "cute" and instead grabbed his change of clothes and shaving kit from his duffel, and went into the bathroom.

He would say one thing about the hotel that he didn't like thus far: The water pressure in the shower was terrible.

That aside, though, it was just a quick matter of soap, water, and steam. He stepped out and wrapped a towel around his waist, tucking it and humming to himself as he got out what he needed.

He brushed his beak and ran a hand along his neck and jawline.

On the unscarred portion of his face, there was a slight stubble starting to form, and he scowled at it.

He got out his razor. Admittedly, it wasn't a razor in the traditional sense, mainly on account of him cutting himself every time he tried one of the normal ones, and he opened it up and turned it on.

It worked in much the same way that a tentacle stylist's prod did, and he began to run it down the side of his face in a smooth, steady motion, the cool tingle as his tentacles shrank back into his face feeling satisfying as he did so.

Internally, he muttered to himself, "Back, foul beast. Back to the pit from whence you came."

Not that he'd ever say something like that out loud. It was too silly-sounding, and he had an image to maintain.

He heard the doorknob turn, and the door swung open to reveal Oriole in her jammies, and she paused as she looked at him.

"What's up?" he asked, not really citing the idea that she should have knocked.

"It can wait," Oriole said a little too quietly, then she closed the door.

He heard her slump down against it as he returned to his work.

Considering that he was shirtless from the waist up, it wasn't hard to understand why someone would have that sort of reaction, but Dason really didn't think anything of it. As far as he was concerned, she just really needed to use the bathroom.

When he was done, he got dressed quick as a blink and opened the door again to let Oriole in.

She ran in past him, pushed him out even though he was already leaving, and practically slammed the door behind him as he stood in the main part of the room, dumbfounded.

Why was she acting so flustered?

Eh, she probably just needed to take a leak really badly.

Dason went and put his shaving kit back in his duffel and pulled on his shoes as Oriole came out of the bathroom.

"So," she said as she grabbed her change of clothes and made her way back to the bathroom for her own shower. "What's the plan for today."

"Well," Dason said. "We need to make a stop first."

***

"Can you tell me," Oriole said from within the changing room, "What, exactly the point of this is?"

Dason didn't look up from the magazine he was reading, not that the article was particularly interesting.

"We're going to the water park, today," Dason explained as he absentmindedly turned a page. "And you said you didn't have a swimsuit."

"That doesn't mean you have to buy me one," Oriole replied as she poked her head out of the dressing room, "And especially not one that looks like this."

She chucked a bikini at his face, and he set it aside in the "no" pile along with several others.

Dason shrugged and went back to his reading. "I still don't understand why you're so sour on those."

"There's hardly anything there!" Oriole protested as she lobbed another one at him. "I feel like you're just doing this because you basically want to see me in my underwear!"

"Fine," Dason said as he closed the magazine and set it aside. "I'll go look for something less revealing."

"Thank you," Oriole said as she went back inside the changing room.

Dason returned with a handful of options, a few of which were two pieces, but with biking shorts or trunks as the bottom, as well as a few one piece suits.

"Here," he said as he shoved his hand behind the curtain that blocked her from view. He made a point to look out towards the mannequins as he did so, so there was no way that she could accuse him of trying to sneak a peek.

Oriole took them with a muttered, "Thank you," and presumably went back to changing.

Dason picked up a completely different magazine and opened it to a random page. They were all those vapid celebrity magazines that too many people bought into and read religiously in spite of the fact that there was probably a scientific study out there that proved that you lost IQ points every time you read one.

As it was, Dason could feel his brain cells committing suicide, one by one.

However, it was better than the alternative, and that was talking to Oriole while she was changing clothes. He likely had a bruise under his mask from where she lobbed one of her shoes at him early into the changing session.

Shoes. Those would be important.

"What size shoe are you, Oriole?" he asked as he put the copy of "Us" down.

"Women's nine," Oriole said.

Dason stood up and went over to where the flip flops were, and snagged a pair in her size in an almost gaudy hot pink. He then thought better of it and grabbed a pair in a much more subdued purple. He snagged a pair of size thirteen men's in red aloha print for himself and returned to his seat.

"Any luck?" he asked, prompting a grumble from Oriole as she poked her head out.

"Can I get a second opinion?" she asked reluctantly.

Dason nodded, and she stepped out from behind the curtain.

She looked like something out of Guy Fieri's wet dreams.

The trunks were black with a flame print on the bottom, while the top was almost a sports bra in style with very similar print.

She looked good in it... at least as good as someone could look in a monstrosity like that. It should be said that Guy Fieri has no sense of taste.

Dason was also very glad that he was wearing his mask, mainly on account of where his eyes were staring despite his best wishes.

Where did she _put_ those?

Then again, she always wore loose-fitting clothing so it made sense that he wouldn't have noticed up until this point.

"The pattern is fuck ugly," Dason said, using a phrase that Valentina had taught him a while back. "But it's a good style on you. Should I get it in a different color?"

Dason thought he saw Oriole beginning to blush before she ducked back inside the changing room.

"Do they have it in that floral print? I liked the pattern on some of the earlier ones, but I hated the style."

"I can manage that," Dason said as he went over to the racks and began to rifle through again.

"Looking for something for the girlfriend?" an inkling in her middle years said as she approached in order to help Dason.

"She's not my girlfriend," Dason said a little too quickly.

"Sister?"

"No," he said firmly as he held up the style that they were looking for. "Do you have this in aloha print? And can we mix and match the sizes between sets?"

The inkling gave a knowing smile and looked at the swimsuit he proffered. "Yes to both questions. What do you need?"

"Medium bottom, large top," Dason said, and followed her to a rack of swimsuits in the right patterns and sizes.

Dason selected a white with red flowers for Oriole, and brought it back to the changing room before stuffing his hand inside.

She took it, and a moment later, she let out a sigh of relief. "This one fits a lot better across the... well, the chest," she said as she stepped out and examined herself in the mirror just outside.

Dason gave her a thumbs-up, and she grinned in return.

Mission accomplished... for now.

Dason paid for the items and they walked back into the park, hooking a right so they could go down to the water park area.

They were early enough that it was a small matter to rent a locker and put their various effects and outerwear inside, leaving them in their swimsuits and flip-flops.

He held up the can of sunblock and asked, "Could you do my back?"

Oriole paused for a moment, then snatched it from his hand and said in a voice that was too firm to be natural, "Turn around."

Dason obliged her and she sprayed across his shoulders and back, rubbing it in with quick, deft movements as if prolonged touch with his skin would cause her to contract some kind of disease.

That was odd.

He didn't think anything of it, though, and definitely didn't connect it to the moment earlier in the day when she had seen him shirtless and nearly had an aneurysm as a result. For his part, Dason had to force himself to think about Ms. Svedka in the same outfit that Oriole was wearing at this moment, if only because saying "Down, boy, this is serious" was not an effective deterrent to the brief thrill that rushed through his body.

"Thanks," Dason said as he turned around and faced her.

"Could..." Oriole asked shyly, "Could you do my back too?"

Dason was surprised to find himself acting in much the same way that she had, with quick spritzes of the sunblock and his hands moving almost as fast to rub it in.

He had to force himself to think ugly thoughts.

Dead babies.

Banjo music.

The mere concept of Applebees.

Telling a child that Urchin Claus wasn't real.

The thought of Valentina getting a boyfriend.

Raw tomatoes.

The "Live Action" remake of _The Lion King._

His mother. 

It worked well enough.

Dason was not only flaccid after going through that list, but practically suffering shrinkage. It was all for the best.

They walked out into the water park and were stopped by a security crab that pointed at a sign that said "You must be this tall to enter."

It was set pretty solidly at five feet tall, and Dason and Oriole both stood beside it to confirm to the security crab that they were, in fact, tall enough, and stepped entered the park with the security crab's approval.

"What was that about?" Oriole asked hesitantly.

"To prevent drownings. Most of the pools at the end of the rides are three feet deep, and the Lazy River is three and a half," Dason explained.

Oriole let out a soft "Ohhhh" in understanding as they entered the water park, and her expression changed to a weird combination of joy and fear as she glanced about.

There were as many water slides and other rides as there had been roller coasters, perhaps more, and throughout the park, there was a Lazy River with relaxing folks just coasting along inside.

Dason was pretty sure that one in every three was asleep.

"So," Dason said, "Where should we start first?"

Oriole glanced around and swallowed nervously. "Ummm... your pick?"

Even as he grabbed her wrist and started dragging her along, he could tell that she regretted that decision.

He led her to a short line for a very tall slide... one that had an eighty-five-degree drop almost five stories down.

"Dason, I'm not sure about this..." Oriole said as they neared the top.

"You can always take the chicken line back down," Dason said with a shrug.

"Chicken line?"

"They give you a complimentary chicken hat, and you have to wear it for the rest of the day, because you're a chicken," he explained.

Oriole just stared at him.

Dason figured that this would be a good opportunity to twist the knife a little more.

"Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep."

Oriole slapped him. Hard.

Hard enough that she knocked his mask slightly off-kilter. He had to twist the respiration piece back into place and shake his head to test how well it held.

"Nobody calls me chicken," she said, and stormed ahead of him.

Two people went down the chicken line before they got to their turn, and they hung their heads in shame as the chicken hat was placed on their heads. That only seemed to stiffen Oriole's resolve even further, and she and Dason took their places.

He heard the instructions to keep their backs against the slide and to keep their arms either at their sides or folded across their chests.

"You know, like a body in a coffin," Oriole's handler joked.

He saw her blanch slightly, but she laid down and followed the handler's instructions.

"Go," Dason's handler said, and he pushed himself down and let the water carry him a frighteningly beautiful fifty feet down, the curvature of the slide carrying him twenty feet forward before he landed in the pool.

He immediately sank to the bottom and planted his feet underneath him to burst out of the surface like an ancient god ascending to reclaim the world it once owned, and he had to vent his mask so the water got out of it before he choked.

The downsides of anonymity.

There was another splash next to him as he vented the mask, and Oriole shot up out of the water with a loud, "Whoooo!"

She turned towards Dason and waggled a finger at him, saying, "Who's the chicken, now?!"

Dason stared at her for a moment and turned to walk away. As he left the pool, he said only, "Bok bok bok."

"YOU GET BACK HERE!" Oriole said as she started surging forward in the water towards him.

Dason snickered and kept a brisk pace as he walked (there were repeated signs that said "no running," after all) and led the way to the next slide.

The next one required that they grab individual inner tubes, and Dason slung his over his shoulder casually as they walked, not even pausing to pick out one that was fully inflated (he honestly didn't care), and making his way to the slide only entitled "The Typhoon."

"So what's this one's gimmick? Chicken hat again?"

"Nah. That's only for the one slide. Though I could still get one for you if you wanted," Dason said.

Oriole stared at him levelly, and slugged him in the shoulder when he said again: "Bok bok bok."

He deserved that one, and resisted the urge to rub at his shoulder afterwards.

Oriole went first on this one, and let out a holler as she went down the slide. He wasn't long in following.

The structure of The Typhoon was a quick drop into a bowl-like structure, where riders would spiral down until they went into the "event horizon" of the bowl and continued down into another mess of twists and turns that ended in a much larger three-foot deep pool.

Oriole was already waiting for him as he came out, and her expression was a wry smile.

"You're slow."

"I'm also bigger than you, so I stayed in the bowl for longer," Dason said, though he wasn't entirely sure if that's how this worked.

"Slow old man," Oriole prodded.

"Don't you start that."

"Should I get you a walker? Maybe some Depends?"

"Better to be old and without fear than to be a spring chicken," Dason said as he walked out and waggled his arms as if he were doing the funky chicken dance.

Oriole laughed at that for a change, then replied, "So old. You even look like a geezer when you do that stupid dance."

"Fight me," Dason replied.

"I'll win," Oriole said as she punched him a little more playfully in the shoulder. The problem was that her fist connected exactly where it had while they were waiting for The Typhoon.

The next ride required a figure-eight style inner tube, big enough to fit two, and was called (ever so creatively) "The Black Hole."

It was a tunnel that was completely dark, save for occasional flashes of neon-colored light, and Dason rode in the back while Oriole took the front, and cheered the entire time.

However, after that, their momentum was arrested for two reasons.

First, they were hungry.

Second, they needed to satisfy that hunger, and there was a perfectly fine food court in order to do it.

It was simple-appearing fare with a little bit of a fancy twist. Oriole ordered a blackened burger with pepper jack cheese, green bell peppers, a green chimichurri, and a sprinkling of what was only described as "Murder Sauce."

One bite made her face light up in delight and her tentacles slowly turn red like mercury climbing up a thermometer.

He would not call her chicken for the rest of the day, he mused as he ate his goat tacos topped with coleslaw and red tomatillo sauce.

His gaze wandered about to find the next spot that they would go to even as he alternated between bites of his meal and sips of his guava juice.

It wasn't long before Dason's gaze settled on something not too far from the food court, and Oriole's gaze was drawn to it as well.

It was a lazy-looking boat ride that was entitled "The Tunnel of Love," like someone would see at any hack job establishment, except this one looked somewhat reputable.

They both stared at it for a few minutes before Dason looked back over at her.

"No," she said firmly.

"Oh, hell no," he agreed.

They ate the rest of the meal in silence before they started to make their way towards a very fun-looking log flume ride, complete with water guns for guests to shoot at the riders, and a bridge that put people straight in the splash zone.

"So quick question," Dason said as they walked.

"It better not be about that thing that we shouldn't be talking about," Oriole said, not even deigning to use the name.

"Why don't you want to go on-"

"Dason, we're not going to talk about it," she said firmly, then sped up a couple of steps so he couldn't see her blushing.

To tell the truth, he was about as red as a beet under his mask as well.

They continued walking and made their way around a bend to get on the first ride that they saw that was not the Tunnel of Love: Called only the Rattlesnake.

For this one, they didn't have to get a tube, instead getting right in line and slowly climbing their way to the top of the ride, which almost rivaled the Lazy River in sheer sprawl. 

They didn't talk, even with all the people around them chatting with their fellow riders, and Dason paused to ask a question.

Oriole cut him off by saying, "We're not going on that one," she said as she folded her arms across her chest a little more tightly.

"I wasn't going to ask about that," Dason said. That much was the truth.

"Oh," Oriole said as she relaxed visibly. "What were you going to ask, then?"

"Are you having a good time?" he asked.

Oriole gave a shy smile and she looked down at her hands. "Yeah. I am. Thank you for all of this..." her gaze turned suspicious as she looked back at him. "Even if I do think that it's kind of sketchy that you won't tell me how you managed to arrange all of this."

"Think it's sketchy all you want," Dason said, "I'm still not telling you."

Oriole frowned, but he could see that her heart wasn't in it, and she soon turned to laughter as they climbed up a little higher.

Turns out that the reason they didn't have to get a tube was because there was a dispenser for them closer to the top of the ride.

Dason indicated that there were only two of them, and the ride's employees pulled out one of the smaller tubes that were closer to rafts in design, and readied it so they could climb in. There was the whole usual spiel about how "keeping your arms and legs inside the ride at all times" blah blah blah, and Dason tuned them out as he relaxed almost lazily in the raft.

Oriole just watched him cautiously before the employees let the raft go down the slide.

Within a few moments, the slide's name because quickly apparent, as they hit a couple of patches of bumpy slide one after the other.

Oriole let out a yelp as the raft vibrated underneath them, and they soon began to pick up speed, rolling up and down the sides of the wide slide, occasionally hitting patches of rough slide that made Oriole grab onto the handles of the tube tightly, as if she might be thrown from them.

Dason only laughed and threw his hands up in the air, prompting a look from Oriole that seemed to ask the question, "Are you out of your mind?!"

If having fun meant that he was out of his mind, then yes. He was.

They soon hit a patch of rough slide that took them five seconds to pass over, then they splashed into the wading pool where a couple more employees waited to help the riders out and to retrieve the rafts.

Oriole's legs were shaky as they walked back out onto the sidewalk.

"Let's not do that one again," she said with a small quiver in her voice.

"Okay," Dason said with a shrug as they were splashed with a spray of water from another ride. There were guests situated on either side of the end of the drop with stand-mounted water guns that fired powerful and precise spray at the riders after the descent of the log splashed the guests with a wave of water.

"Want to do that one?" Dason asked as he jerked his thumb at it.

"I'll tell you what," Oriole said as she stepped with a little more purpose. "You can go on it. I'll sit this one out."

Dason had a distinct feeling that she was going to get on one of the guns and try to blast him as he came down.

Even so, he went around to the line and was on board within minutes.

The giant log-esque thing made its way up a ramp with the same "click-click-click" as a good roller coaster, then flatbellied its way into a bed of water that caused a couple of the other riders to yelp and squeal in surprise. Dason didn't. He neither yelped nor squealed, especially not in surprise. He was a hard-boiled gumshoe, a real biscuit-boxer, a tough lug that could take a hit and keep on coming.

They went down the ramp and Dason kept his hands at his sides, despite the instinctive desire to throw his hands up with the rest of the crowd.

When he came down, though, he was surprised, and he did let out a yelp. He also threw up his hands in front of his mask.

Oriole was standing at one of the water cannons with a gleeful grin and a desire to kill, and blasted Dason straight in the face with the same accuracy as an X-ranked charger. He sputtered, and had   
to vent his mask twice as she followed him along, and even screamed out "ORIOLE!" in the same kind of voice that one would reserve for their arch-nemesis, usually accompanied by a bout of vigorous fist-shaking.

He was going to strangle her when he came off that ride.

He was going to throw her over his shoulder and chuck her into the lazy river, no inner tube necessary.

He was going to make her sleep on the floor, especially after he sprawled on the bed in such a way that if she wanted to sleep on the bed, she would be sleeping in a very uncomfortable way that would also require that she was touching him.

He was thinking about all the things he was going to do, most of which were much tamer than he realized, in retrospect, and came off the bridge over the ride's track to receive a water balloon smack in the face.

He wiped the water from his goggles so he could see and saw Oriole bouncing another on the palm of her hand with a broad grin on her face and a partially-drenched water balloon salesman standing behind her. He was also grinning, despite the soaked state of his clothes and cart.

"Oriole, I'm going to-"

She lobbed another one at him before he could finish his sentence, and it splashed against his mask, leaving fragments of balloon in his vision along with the water.

He heard Oriole and the salesman laughing, and he stormed forward with a will, snagging one from the inkling's cart and flipping him a bill as he chucked it after her, beaning her straight in the small of her back to a delighted yell. A few passersby yelled as well, then laughed just as much as Oriole did as Dason stomped forward and loomed over her.

Oriole didn't stop laughing despite Dason's intimidating presence.

"You should have seen the look on your face!" she wheezed, and Dason paused in his looming.

"What?"

"You were so surprised! And the way you were hollering after me, I thought you were pissed! I'm glad you're having fun, too, though." She relaxed, though a few giggles escaped her lips, and she looked up at him.

"How..." he muttered.

"How what?"

"How did you see the look on my face?" he asked. He couldn't even see the look on his face. Even with a mirror.

"Maybe I'm just learning how to read you," Oriole said as she turned and started to walk away.

He was half tempted to charge after her, pick her up, and carry her off over his shoulder to climb the tallest structure in sight, but he was also worried that would not only get them evicted from the park, but also invoke copyright infringement.

Somewhere in the world, an author is stuffing all of his beloved belongings into a bag and calling his lawyer before he goes off grid, simply because he was considering the idea.

Dason, on the other hand, numbly fell into step and followed her as she grabbed a two-person inner tube and readied it for the Lazy River.

"Why?" Dason asked.

"We've been going at full speed for two days, so I figure we could use a breather," Oriole said as she patted the other side of the tube once she was settled. Her other hand hung onto the railing that led into the river, and Dason let out a sigh as he flopped onto the inner tube as well.

"That's the spirit," she said as she let go and they began to coast downriver.

They stayed in there for about an hour.

They didn't talk much. They didn't do much of anything, to tell the truth. They just... floated. Basked. Enjoyed the feeling of each other's legs pressing up against one another, though Dason wasn't likely to admit that. This was probably the closest that they'd been to each other for the longest period of time, and he was satisfied with that.

Eventually, their inner tube stopped, and Dason pulled his head up, his tentacles still dripping with the water that they had been submerged in.

"I want to go on another slide," she said as she hauled herself out of the inner tube and onto one of the steps. The various squids that bumped against their tube didn't complain. There was something about the mere concept of the Lazy River that made people sleepy, complacent, and relaxed, despite the excited and terrified shouts that came from the various rides they passed.

"We've hit all the good ones," Dason said as he ungracefully rolled out of the tube and faceplanted into the water. He vented his mask as he grabbed the tube and hauled it out. "We could always go back and hit some more coasters until sunset."

Oriole was halfway out of the Lazy River when she froze and turned her gaze towards Dason with a light in her eyes that seemed gleeful at best and outright mad at worst.

"Fine, coasters it is," Dason conceded as he climbed out and chucked the inner tube onto the pile alongside all of the others just outside the entrance into the Lazy River.

Afterwards, it was a hop, skip, and a jump back to their locker (the fees were criminal, but Dason wasn't going to mention that to Oriole), and once they threw on their shirts (because pants were bullshit anyways), they went back into the main park and made a beeline towards the coasters.

They rode "The Brute" twice more (thank goodness for the fast passes), as well as EndZone, a chaotic coaster named "Chasing the Sun," and the wooden coaster based off pictures of an old world human coaster called "The Ghost Rider" where the cars actually went back into the frame of the ride as they rode.

After the wooden coaster, they had to stop.

"Alright, let's do-" Oriole started to say before Dason grabbed her hand.

"Nope," he said as he pulled her aside.

"But I want to-" Oriole began to protest.

"Oriole," Dason said, and his voice held more gravity in this moment than it had in the vast majority of their conversations over the past two days. "Can you trust me on this? If you're not satisfied, we can always come back and do more coasters another time."

Oriole stared at him, dumbfounded at first, then suspicious, then acquiescing. "Okay. I trust you."

Dason led the way out of the park, strangely enough, and over to the boardwalk. It still had that same temperate warmth that one would expect from a beachside boardwalk during the springtime, even if Dason found the occasional breeze unwelcome.

The sun was setting, the shops were all closed, and Dason went around the back to one of the buildings, a solid five-story affair about a block up from the boardwalk. "I might need a hand with some of this," Dason said as he kept his head on a swivel.

"O...kay?" Oriole said as she watched him as he watched. She didn't shout as he pulled her into a back alley, which was definitely a plus. He didn't want to attract unwanted attention.

There were a couple of dumpsters, several black trash bags, and an east-coast-style fire escape, with the ladder that needed to be pulled down.

"Alright," Dason said as he glanced around. "I need two pieces of wire. If you can find paperclips, that would be perfect."

Oriole stared at him as he started searching, then began searching herself. He could tell that, at the moment, she was regretting this decision.

"What are you doing?" she hissed as she picked up the first piece of wire (a paperclip, just as he asked).

"Just a minor case of trespassing with a side of B&E," he explained.

"What?!"

That last thing came out of her mouth too loud for Dason's liking, and he hushed her with a wave of his hands, especially considering that there was a small group passing by at the entryway of the alley.

"Just... trust me. Please," he said, and his voice was almost pleading. He held up another paper clip, and Oriole handed hers to him.

He worked some magic that Koi had taught him, made an anchor and a pick, then stood on top of one of the dumpsters before he launched himself onto the ladder leading down from the fire escape.

Oriole watched as he hummed to himself and climbed up, then picked the padlock that was on the fire escape and lowered it down so she could climb up as well.

Once she was up, he pulled up the ladder and padlocked it back into place, putting the paper clips into the pocket of his hoodie afterwards.

"Where did you learn to do that?" Oriole asked as she crept up the fire escape's stairs.

Dason followed her lead, making sure that there wasn't too much creaking, and replied, "Part of my dark and shady past."

Oriole paused, stared back at Dason and said, "Right now, it doesn't just seem like your past that's dark and shady."

"Hey," Dason said, "I take exception to that."

"Why?" she replied, "Because you're literally making me an accomplice?"

"I mean..." Dason said. Oriole stopped and glared at him once more.

"Not entirely?" he said, then prodded her, "It'll be worth it. Trust me. Just keep going and you'll see why."

They reached the top floor of the building, and went to one edge where they gazed out across the entirety of Wahoo World.

"Wow," Oriole said, and it seemed like all of her cares had been washed away by that simple view.

"We're going to hang out here for a bit," Dason said, and sat down on the edge of the building with his legs dangling off.

"Wait what?" Oriole said, "I thought you just wanted me to see the view?"

"I do. The view isn't done yet," He said as he unbuckled his mask and set it down next to him, just so she knew that he meant business.

Oriole opened her mouth and closed it before sitting down with him. He knew that she wouldn't jump, not now. Mainly because there was another fire escape just below them that would stop her fall.

Five minutes after the sun sank into the sea, the park lit up.

The coasters on one side were done up in lights that matched the color of the rainbow, though no coaster had more than three colors to each. The ferris wheel that they'd ridden the day before didn't follow that standard, instead looking like a pinwheel of color, with patterns showing up in the lights along the spokes.

The water park had spots, all in different hues as they blasted the slides and gave the riders a particularly epic backdrop to ride along to. The Lazy River itself was a slowly-changing ribbon of blue to green to red to blue again.

"Wow..." Oriole said with much more gravity than before. As the lights went up, there was a chime that rang out all across the park that echoed from a half-dozen bell towers.

"What was that?" Oriole asked as she stared at Dason.

"Just a ten-minute warning before the show starts. The park will be open for another hour, but I don't know if we'll be able to get back in before last call."

Oriole glared at him. Clearly, she wanted to ride with the lights on.

"If you're sore about it, I'll take you back here, someday," he said as he held up his hands. "Promise."

Oriole held up a hand with only the little finger extended.

Dason gripped it. There was a special circle of hell reserved for those that broke pinky promises. That circle was also reserved for terrible teachers, people that talked in the theater, and folks that mained Kensa weapons.

They waited for another ten minutes, with Oriole enraptured by the light displays. Every other minute, the ones on the coasters changed colors, while the ones in the water park remained constant.

That didn't match her expression when the magic started in earnest.

It was full night, no sunlight in sight, and music began to waft out from the central square of the park. It was a song that started off with a slow guitar riff that echoed out into the boardwalk, followed by a drum track that began the fireworks. They shot off with precise enough timing that they detonated on the appropriate beat and shot out sparks of light into the air that sometimes crackled, sometimes just flickered, and occasionally detonated over completely different parts of the park.

When they hit the chorus, things went completely off the rails, with blue, red, and gold sparks flying all over the place as the lead singer sang: 

_If I go crazy  
Then will you still call me Superman?_

_If I'm still alive,_  
then will you be there,  
holding my hand? 

The song almost seemed too fitting, but he looked over at her after the first chorus, and his voice caught in his throat as she saw the expression of sheer glee on her face.

Oriole watched in a state of rapture at the sight of the fireworks, the music matching the accompanying explosions perfectly, the firelight shining in her eyes.

He wanted to tell her how he felt. He wanted to spill his guts, the beans, whatever could be spilled in this moment in order to convey how he felt, but seeing her so happy reminded him of a simple thing.

He was doing this to help her find a reason to live, not to tell her how he felt.

He watched her, not the fireworks.

This was all for her, after all, and he wanted to make sure that she was enjoying it as much as she could.

He knew that he'd done right because of one simple thing.

At the final climax of the whole show, he saw her face in a way that he'd never seen before, as if her face couldn't move right to properly portray the smile that she had in her soul.

The light from the fireworks splashed against her skin, blue and green and gold, and he knew.

This, at the very least, he'd done right.


	18. Chapter 18

A tugboat's engine chugging along can be a soothing thing, sometimes. It's rhythmic, the rocking of the waves can lull one off into a sense of relaxation.

The black smoke is blocked out by your gas mask.

Dason didn't know where he was going with this train of thought.

But he did know where the tug was headed: The Lost Outpost.

It wasn't the best map for a variety of reasons. There weren't a lot of decent fallback points should shit go fuckways, people didn't know to ink the walls and climb them during a Goldfly assault, and it was so easy to fall through the grates when you were in a rush.

Grizz always chose the _loveliest_ places to send his employees.

But, at the very least, Dason had a good team, from the looks of things. Oriole was with him, for one. The other two members of the team were a heavyset inkling with a gaze that extended a thousand yards, all in the direction of the place that they were going. The last was a girl that sat quietly and didn't really comment on the ride or attempt to make plans.

Making plans was for people that had worked together for a while, and he and Oriole knew how each other worked.

In this case, the silence was a good thing.

Oriole was sitting at the bow of the boat with her hands folded in front of her, her eyes closed as she seemed to be sleeping. Then again, for anyone without a gas mask, it was going to be hard to sleep with the acrid stuff coming out of the smokestack.

Apparently, Grizz was like many other business moguls in that he hadn't fully embraced the idea of alternative energy sources.

Then again, there had been plenty of people in Inkopolis that used hydroelectric or solar in order to keep their homes or places of business running.

The fact that Grizz used coal and oil was almost tacky at this point.

Those had been human beings, once upon a time.

"Approaching The Lost Outpost," a voice said on speakers from the wheelhouse.

Oriole stood up (she had not been sleeping, apparently), and made her way towards the rear of the ship with the other two members of their shift to retrieve the weapons that Grizz had mandated for this run.

Why he wouldn't let them bring their own, Dason had no idea.

The girl took the Nozzlenose H-3 (thank the fucking Zapfish), and the heavyset inkling snagged an E-Liter 4k almost as quickly.

That left Oriole and Dason with an Aerospray MG and Dualie Squelchers, respectively.

Dason didn't have a lot of experience with the dualies system, but even though they felt like he was carrying around a pair of cordless drills, he knew the kind of havoc that these things could wreak on a salmonid line, especially once one focused fire.

He wasn't displeased.

"Disembark," the pilot said as the gangplank extended, and the crew marched wordlessly off and took up positions by the egg basket.

"Alright, bait," Grizz's scratchy voice came through the speakers. It wasn't the sonorous, almost operatic tone that he'd heard in Grizz's office, but rather speaker sounds being played through another speaker. "Get ready for this. And remember: If you do well, there will be a little extra in it for you."

Dason could see the mixture of hate and avarice in Oriole's eyes as Grizz said that, and he reached out to rest a hand on her shoulder. "Settle down. We'll do this the same way that we have before."

"Divide and conquer?" Oriole asked.

"Damn straight," Dason said as he removed his hand. "I'll guard the big guy. You fan out and snag eggs. Holler for help if you need it."

"Right," she said, and finally seemed to settle down.

"Firing up the lures," Grizz said, "Clench up, bait."

That was a phrase that usually preceded something terrible.

So, of course, the first round went excellently.

All the Salmonids seemed to throw at them were scrappers, steel eels, and the occasional steelhead. Everything came to them instead of the crew going out to them, and that meant that the eggs were within easy reach.

Furthermore, the heavyset inkling seemed to be a handy shot with the E-Liter, and managed to take out most of the Steelheads before they even managed to launch off a single bomb.

It was beautiful. They raked in forty-six eggs that round alone.

"Holy shit," the other girl said just as Grizz's voice snapped through the speakers, "SWITCH UP! MORE INCOMING!"

It was the first time that Dason heard her speak.

"I think that we might be able to clear a hundred, today," she said in a state of awe.

Oriole was landed with the E-Liter, and Dason had the filthy H-3 in his hands as the Salmonid-tech-generated clouds rolled in and familiar flickers of light came by.

"Ink the walls!" Dason said as he proceeded to follow his own advice. "Climb up if the glowflies are on you!"

They came in, and Dason was the first one swarmed.

"Son of a-"

He cut himself off as he changed into squid form and ran up the wall, the salmonids congregating at the bottom as his team lay into them. Within a minute, they had twenty eggs stashed, and the flies had moved on to Oriole.

Which, all things considered, was for the best. While her E-liter was powerful, she could only cut into the ranks so much before they surged right back twofold. She climbed up the wall, and Dason began to pick off the goldies with the Uglynose in his hands.

Zapfish Above, why did it have to be so _slow_?

They only slowed down when the flies started swarming the heavyset inkling, now holding the Aerospray, and managed to finish the round with fifty eggs stashed.

Dason didn't say anything. Three more eggs, and they'd be able to break the fabled hundred-egg barrier.

Legend had it that Grizz had something special for a crew that managed to reach that point, an extra bonus or something. Dason had yet to meet someone that had passed that mark.

"Next wave! Switch up!"

Dason practically threw the Uglynose at the hefty inkling, and almost got brained by the E-Liter coming his way.

Oriole held the pair of Squelchers in her hand and spun them easily. Dason only stared at her and asked, "Why?"

"I can't be the only one to suffer this match," she replied nonchalantly.

"He suffered!" Dason said as he pointed at the heavier inkling, who only glared right back at him.

"Yeah, but I feel less guilty about making you do terribly," she replied. She smiled at him, and Dason growled under his breath. If they lost this round, he was going to give her such a tongue-lashing.

...There had to be a better phrase for that.

Even so, while they didn't have the same amount of luck as the first round, only two flyfish showed up, and they were taken down rather quickly. The only trouble was a series of three stingers (aka: Potheads) that showed up to give them a bit of a hard time. Even so, they managed to stash the last egg for their quota a good twenty seconds before deadline.

The buzzer went off, and Dason and Oriole looked at each other with glee spreading on their faces. Their teammates actively cheered.

"There's no way that Grizz can deny me this one!" Oriole said giddily, practically bouncing on the balls of her feet. "He can't! I stashed the most eggs during that goldie round!"

Dason nodded in agreement. He wanted to hug her for a moment, but paused as the speakers in their headsets crackled.

"What's he on about now?" The heavyset inkling said. His voice was much higher-pitched than Dason expected, especially with a chest that deep, and Dason blinked away his confusion to listen in.

"Crew," Grizz said. That caused Dason even more confusion. Whenever Grizz spoke to them, he almost exclusively referred to them as "Bait."

Whatever this was, it was serious.

"I hate to cut the celebration short, but we have something big incoming. Bigger than a mothership. I hope you saved some of your specials, because if this is what I think, you're going to need them."

Dason swallowed, and he could see the look of fear on his teammates' faces.

"Don't even worry about collecting eggs this round. If you make it out in one piece, I'll give you a total of four superbonuses. You just have to survive. If you aren't in one piece by the time that I can pull you back, there's no guarantee that I'll be able to."

"Don't worry about collecting eggs," Grizz had said.

Now Dason _knew_ it was serious.

"Just hold on for three minutes. Same as any other shift. I'll have an out for you by then. Hold on!"

The radio went dead.

"What's he on about..." the hefty inkling said again, though he said it much more cautiously.

The dark clouds rolled in, and the other girl looked up at the clouds with an expression of worry.

"Hey, he's just messing with us, right? A prank? Some sort of hazing into the hundred-egg squad? Right? Right, guys?"

No klaxons went off. For some reason, the darkness seemed even more oppressive than usual.

Off the piers on one side, Dason saw a figure rising from the water.

It was tall, taller than a cohock, but not the size of a steelhead. It was still a salmonid, if the muzzle was anything to go off, and a cap (not unlike the Legendary Cap awarded to exceptional players back home) sat on its head.

It carried an anchor as easily as Dason would carry his own weapon. Of course, his weapon wasn't as big as he was, and baleful red eyes glowed in the darkness that the clouds cast.

And then it spoke.

_**"Inklings. Creatures come from the world's reforging. Your crimes are grave."**_

Its voice resounded all throughout the arena, echoed off the metal box that suddenly seemed like a prison, and seemed to have a sense of gravity to it, if the way that Dason's knees buckled was any indication.

_**"I am Sturgeon. In the course of the past ten minutes, like a handful before you, you have managed to spit in my eye on the behalf of the one known as Grizz.**_

 _ **"However, I am not without mercy."**_ The figure straightened up and set his anchor down on the ground beside him. It looked like the kind of thing that could be either weapon or shield. _**"Return what you have taken, and I will consider the debt paid. Refuse, and I will take you instead."**_

With that, he raised the anchor as easily as a practiced fencer would raise a sword. _**"Speak your answer,"**_ that oppressive voice said once again, _**"And I will know your true face."**_

Dason didn't know any way to tell Sturgeon that they couldn't return the eggs, that they had been transported to who-knew-where the second that the rounds ended.

"We don't have them," the other girl's voice called out. "We don't have them! We were just working! Can't you let us go?"

She wasn't a coward. In the face of what looked like the leader of the Salmonids, Dason was surprised that he didn't say much the same.

_**"Cowardice. You refuse to face your fate. I hear your answer, and I will end you as a result."**_

More shadows moved in the water, more forms coming out of the ichor that surrounded the area.

"What are we going to do?" the hefty inkling said, and he glanced at everyone else.

"We have two minutes, thirty seconds to evac," Oriole spoke up. "We survive until then."

The other girl seemed ready to break down for a moment, but she let out a sigh to steady herself, then straightened up. "We're all going to die," she said firmly, then readied the Aerospray in her hands.

"Not if I can help it," The heftier inkling said.

Then, they looked back to the water, and saw forms that they hadn't seen before.

Three of them were similar to scrappers, but had massive exhaust pipes reaching up out of the back, and what looked like splatlings on the front. They wobbled as if they were having a hard time steering, and one of them almost veered into the water.

The others were long, black shapes with glowing golden eyes and a singular spine jutting out from underneath their chins.

They held back.

That made Dason feel a sense more concern. He never knew Salmonids as the type to hold back in any circumstance, and the fact that these were meant that they were either trump cards, or that they were waiting for an opening to rush in and strike at the weakened.

Dason didn't know which was more terrifying.

"They're coming from all sides," Oriole said, calm as could be. She sounded detached, like she had those weeks ago when Dason had found the noose in her closet, the noose that was now little more than a pile of ash in a trash can.

Could she possibly think of this as her opportunity to die?

No. That was ridiculous. He hoped that he'd given her enough of a reason to live, and he wouldn't stand for that kind of thought from himself now.

He stuffed it back into a corner of his mind where his other thoughts could pummel on it like they wanted its lunch money, and spoke in as cool of a tone as he could.

"Steady," Dason said as he began taking potshots. He dropped one goldie, then another, and a line of chums and smallfries that were getting a little close. Fortunately, they hadn't called in the artillery... yet.

Flyfish would be too much to deal with on top of all of this.

Whoever this "Sturgeon" was, they were clearly a fan of the infantry.

"Scrapper coming up behind us!" the girl called out as she started to open fire. Dason turned around and disabled it with a snap shot before turning back towards Sturgeon. He wasn't moving, nor were the creatures wreathed in black on each of the piers.

Oriole, however, was.

She was stepping forward and unleashing hell from her dualies, mowing down rows of chums and smallfries, and even the occasional cohock.

"You help the others!" Oriole called out as she continued to hold the line as best as she could. She was dipping in and grabbing ink whenever there was a breather (which wasn't often, but she managed to stay afloat), and it looked like she could last forever.

That was, at least, until one of the little ankle-biters grabbed onto her and began slamming away at her shin.

Oriole yelped and threw herself back.

Right into the path of a cohock's frying pan.

It collided with her, and Dason let out a cry of "Oriole!" as the swarm descended on her, splatting her in a heartbeat.

_**"Retrieve her,"**_ came Sturgeon's booming voice, and three of the black figures on the pier lunged forward as Dason struggled to cut down the incoming horde.

"I need some help over here!" Dason said, and the hefty inkling peeled around to squeeze off quick three shot bursts with the Uglynose, all three hitting their target.

Dason hated that weapon, but he was damn good with it. He still blasted away whole lines of salmonids with charged shots.

Then he saw one of the black figures with glowing spines on its chin dragging Oriole's preserver away.

***

When the claws of the dark fish clamped on her preserver and began dragging her away, she was first confused, then glad.

This was what she had been waiting for, wasn't it?

It pulled her onto the pier, and Sturgeon's voice rippled through the air with its own gravity.

_**"Octarian? What a surprise to see you here."**_

She didn't know him. Why was he confused?

From within her life preserver, she saw Dason and the heftier inkling fighting for dear life, but still making a push towards her.

"Oriole!" he called again as he stepped outside of the metal box.

_He cares about you._

The thought came unbidden, unwanted, and she shook it off. This is what she wanted. An end. An out.

_Is that what you really want?_

_**"You violated our pact, Octarian,"**_ Sturgeon said with a growl in his voice that seemed to shake the very rivets of the buildings. _**"You said you would provide us technology, and we would leave you alone."**_

_I never made an agreement like that. I don't know anything about Octarian tech._

"Oriole! I'm coming!" Dason said as he fired off another lance of ink to cut towards her.

It still came up short.

_He's fighting so hard to save you. Won't you fight to save yourself?_

She quashed the thought.

_**"And yet, I find you up here, taking our eggs once again. Perhaps I should pay another visit to Octo Valley and rehash our agreement?"**_

Dason moved a little closer. He could take the shot and save her, if he wanted.

He was interrupted by one of those splatling-riding salmonids coming his way, and Dason let out a curse and errantly chucked a bomb in order to drive it off.

The bomb went right in the exhaust chute and exploded, leaving only a smear of ink where it had been.

_**"Octavio will know better this time. I'll see to it. We will take everything from you, and it will only be by my courtesy that you will be left alive at all."**_

Dason paused as he lined up the shot. The heftier inking was suppressing the enemy as best as he could, but they were still growing closer, and the dark fish was dragging Oriole further and further away.

Moments flashed through her memory. Times that she knew he was smiling behind that mask.

The first time that they had lunch together.

Their first shift they completed.

All the lunches after that.

Mario Kart.

Smash.

The way that he'd casually offered to show her his naked neighbors as proof to his story.

_Do you really want to not feel that happy again?_

She could see the conflict in Dason as he stood there with the shot at the ready.

He knew what she was waiting for. He knew that this was what she had thought she wanted.

_**"Perhaps I will claim Octo Valley for the Salmonids, and then I will come for you in Inkopolis, Octarian. You will have no place to run. No home to return to."**_

_Do you really want to leave that behind?_

The question was about Dason and the way that she felt happy when she was with him, not Sturgeon's Bond Villain monologue. Maybe she'd find something that would make her feel just as happy, someday.

"What are you waiting for?" the heavyset inkling asked. There was barely any room to fall back.

He was waiting for her to choose.

_Do you really want to leave him?_

Oriole shook her head and began to struggle against the pull of the dark fish. They were getting closer and closer to Sturgeon, and he loomed over her like a monolith.

She wanted to live.

"Dason!" she called out from her ring.

"Help me! I don't want to die!"

The shot careened over her and slammed right into the chin-spikes of the fish dragging her, and the ink that fell on her was enough to bring her back before she finished her second sentence.

She dove into the ink as Sturgon let out a displeased roar, and the very earth seemed to shake. Oriole cut into the salmonids on the pier with her dualies, diving forward and letting out another volley. Both Dason and the other inkling were splatted by the time that she got to them, and she drove off the black fish that were closing in on them as she approached, then brought them back.

"Help!" came a voice from inside, and all three went in to retrieve their fourth teammate. She'd held them off valiantly for a while, but she could only last so long, it seemed.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," Dason said with a note of pride in his voice as he cleared a path and followed her along it.

Under normal circumstances, she would have slapped him for that.

Under normal circumstances, she would have hugged him and not let go for a long time.

These, however, were far from normal circumstances, so they had to focus on fighting.

They got their last teammate up and at them and huddled around the egg basket, treating it like a goldie assault on any other map, even as Sturgeon gave orders to his soldiers.

_**"Bring them to me. I want them all,"**_ he said.

That only made the four Grizzco Employees fight harder.

"I have an out!" Grizz's voice came through, just as a salvo of ink came in and landed about five feet from where the group was huddled.

It was a super jump point.

One by one, they went in, and Dason held the line until Oriole was out before he followed her.

_**"I will come for you again,"**_ Sturgeon said, and his voice was Absolute Zero. _**"I will drag you all down, and we shall teach you better about taking our eggs."**_

Oriole had a feeling that wasn't just directed at her.

She was glad for that fact.

***

Dason paced around the boat, past the female inkling that sat curled up in one corner, muttering "Never again... never again..."

He'd heard the heavyset inkling saying something like, "Fuck this. I'm going back to work at Spicy Jack's. Grease burns are better than this..."

Oriole was sitting at the bow of the ship as she had been before, as if she wanted to put as much space between herself and the Lost Outpost as she could.

He went over and sat with her, despite a little gremlin in his mind screaming for him not to.

"Hey," he said as he settled down. He removed his Grizzco headgear and set it down next to him. "Are you alright?"

Oriole responded by throwing her arms around his chest and burying her face into the front of the overalls that Grizz issued them at the start of each shift.

Apparently not.

"I didn't want to leave. I didn't want to go," Oriole said, and her voice was cracking, quavering. He had never heard her cry before, and he figured that it wasn't something that she did a lot when they weren't together either.

He would just have to be there for her while she let it out.

"I remembered being with you, and how happy I was. How happy I was to have a friend. How happy I was to be with someone that I cared for, and that cared for me back. I didn't want to die anymore."

Dason may have been dense in matters of women (at least that's how Valentina had put it on a couple of occasions), but he could read between the lines. He held her close and rested his chin on the crown of her head as sobs wracked her body.

"I'm here for you," he said, and he knew that the words carried a lot more gravity to them than the simple phrase meant.

He meant every word.

She let it all out at that point. Her crying wasn't what he expected out of her. It was wailing, pure unadulterated pain, sobs that shook her whole body even as her fingers dug into his clothes and the skin underneath.

She went on like that until about a minute before they docked, and Dason held her the entire time. From the short bursts, gasps of air that sounded like they were shadows of what she really wanted to let out, it mainly sounded like she was just too tired to continue along the same way that she had been.

The ship docked, and Dason had to help her to her feet, even help her walk along. He was afraid she would collapse otherwise.

He gave her shoulder a squeeze as they parted and went off to their separate locker rooms, then waited in line out front of Grizzco to collect his pay.

When Oriole came stumbling out, she made a beeline for him and clutched onto his sweater as if he was some kind of security blanket.

He'd never seen her this... weakened before. She was always a pillar of strength, unmovable as stone. When she was excited, there was nothing that could stand in her way, and when she dug in her heels, there was no force on earth that could push her.

Now, she seemed like she would blow away in a strong breeze if she didn't hang onto him.

"Hey! We were here-"

Dason turned and glared at him. Anyone with eyes could see how Oriole's eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot, and had tear tracks still streaming down her face.

The inkling behind them shut up.

"Dason Stormbringer and Oriole Sterling..." the secretary said as he typed and pulled up their records. "Oh. Well then."

He reached under and withdrew two envelopes with their names on them, bulging to the point of almost coming undone.

"A little extra for your trouble today. Good work," he said, then nodded to the two.

Dason was fully aware of the term "hush money" and was pretty sure that he didn't _want_ to talk about what had happened that day.

He collected Oriole's envelope as well and tucked them into his pocket. She didn't feel like she was letting go.

"Hey," he said as they walked along.

"Mmn?" Oriole said, and her voice was a strained version of its former self.

"No lunch today," he said, and her hands clenched a little tighter on his sweater.

"Hey, hey," he said as he tried to calm her down. "They finally fixed the roof at my place, the neighbors paid damages, and my insurance kicked in. I got the new Legend of Zelda game. Would you like to come over and play? Just spend the night in and order some delivery?"

Oriole muttered something and pulled herself closer to him.

"What was that?"

"Pizza," she said weakly. "Extra meaty."

Dason smiled behind his mask as they went towards the subway. "I think that can be arranged."

They went back and, for a change, took the elevator up. He had a feeling she wouldn't be able to handle the stairs today.

Once they were inside, she kicked off her shoes with some difficulty, hung up her hat and coat, then went in and flopped onto the couch.

She curled up into a ball with a pillow under her head.

Dason hung up his own jacket and made his way into the living room. She looked peaceful, for all that crying had done to her complexion. He could live with that.

He took off his mask and set it on the coffee table, newly replaced since the debacle with upstairs, and went into the kitchen.

Dason put on the kettle and set up two mugs for tea with honey and lemon, then pulled up a chair from the little dining room setup he had before he pulled a blanket over Oriole and made sure she was snugly tucked in.

They sat like that for an hour, only breaking when the kettle went off and Dason poured the hot cups of tea. Hers was cold when she awoke.

"How..." Oriole said as she rubbed at her eyes groggily, "How long was I out?"

"As long as you needed, hopefully," Dason said. He took her cup of tea and reheated it in the microwave before bringing it back to her and pressing it into her hands.

She sat up, the blanket hanging lazily off one shoulder, and her hands curled around the mug for its warmth.

They didn't say anything for a moment.

Dason just let out a sigh after a while and said, "Oriole?"

She looked up at him, mid sip.

"It doesn't have to be like this anymore," he said. It wasn't until he said it that he realized that what he was saying was really vague.

"Living at Ms. Svedka's, sleeping on the floor, working your ass off in order to make a quarter what you should? You don't have to do that anymore, okay?"

Oriole stared warily at him. At least part of her was back to normal.

"You're paid up on rent, right?" Dason asked. "If you are, I'd like you to spend a couple of nights here, see if you like the space. After that, you can move in, if you feel comfortable here."

Oriole smiled down into her tea, and he could tell that she wasn't even trying to hide it. "I don't think I'll need that long to decide," she said.

Dason grinned. He didn't even care about how the action pulled uncomfortably at the burned side of his face. He was happy enough to ignore that. "I'd still like you to stay here tonight. I'll take the couch, and you can have the bedroom."

"I'd be okay if you slept in your own bed," Oriole said, and her cheeks flushed at the statement.

Dason felt his own face growing red as well. He knew the implications, but was fully aware that such wasn't what Oriole intended.

"I can do that," he said, then reached out to rest one hand on hers around the mug. "Pizza?"

Oriole smiled up at him, looking much better than she had an hour before. "Extra Meaty. And I want to see you play this new Zelda game."

Dason was already placing the call when he said, "Deal."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Commander Sturgeon and his new Salmonid minions were designed by Clodcast on Tumblr. Give his "Salmon Run" tag a look, and try to unhear Commander Sturgeon speaking in Sovereign's voice.


	19. Chapter 19

"So you two fucked, right?"

Valentina's question was neither wanted, nor appreciated. In fact, it was safe to say that everyone disliked that.

"Valentina," Starkey said, and his voice was touched with a slight edge of disdain, "Could you please shut the fuck up?"

Claire stared at Starkey in shock. She could count on one hand the number of times that she'd heard him swear, and never once had she heard him use the fuck word.

Everyone stared at Valentina then, and she looked like a subpar stand-up comedian that was waiting for the crowd to laugh, but that quickly faded away.

"Come on..." she groaned as her hands dropped to her sides, "It was a legitimate question."

"You ruin everything," Dason said with a sigh.

"I'm serious! Did you or did you not fuck?"

"Valentina," Dason said.

"You know, go twenty toes?"

"Valentina," Starkey said.

"Heels to the Great Zapfish?"

"Valentina..." Claire said.

"I have to know!"

"This is neither the time nor the place," Dason said.

"This is the exact time and the exact place," Valentina said in return, "You're telling them about your relationship, and I need the deets."

"I really feel uncomfortable talking about my sex life with my sister," Dason sighed.

"Can we get back on topic?" Starkey said. They'd been here for a couple of hours already, and the pizza had gone cold long ago. Then again, Dason hadn't really let up in his storytelling so they didn't mind.

"Honestly, after that, we called Valentina."

"Ohhhhh this is where I finally come back into the story," she said.

"Valentina, please stop talking," Starkey said.

***

"So," Valentina said as she sat across the table from Oriole.

The tension was so thick that one could cut it with a knife, and Dason now realized that having his sister and his girlfriend sitting at the same table at Spicy Jack's Pizza was something that he regretted a great deal.

Girlfriend...

Weird thing to call Oriole. Up until recently, she had been his best friend. In some ways, she still was, but still.

Girl friend. Friend that is girl, but more than friend.

He was overthinking this.

Then again, this was a tactic that he was using to think about something other than the two women sitting on either side of him. 

Valentina's eyes were boring into Oriole's, and Oriole (stubborn as she was) was staring right back, though the difference between their postures was night and day.

Valentina's back was straight as a rod, and she almost seemed to be looking down her nose at Oriole. Clearly, she had learned something from Kamila.

Oriole, on the other hand, was hunched, her shoulders almost up to her ears, but she didn't look browbeaten. Instead, she looked just as likely to leap across the table and start strangling Valentina.

This was a terrible start.

"This is the other woman in your life?" Valentina asked, before she looked over at Dason.

Aaaaand leave it to her to somehow make it worse.

Oriole's gaze snapped over to Dason, and now she looked like she was about ready to strangle _him_.

"You said we were going to meet your sister," Oriole said.

"This is my sister," Dason said as he gestured at Valentina.

"What's your last name?" Oriole asked Valentina.

"Brook."

Oriole's eyes bored into Dason's mask, and he was worried that the lenses on it would break.

"Your last name is Stormbringer," she said.

"I took our father's last name, she took our mother's," Dason said defensively.

"Stormbringer sounds like a made-up as hell name, and you're sounding really suspicious right now."

Dason's mouth dropped open, and it must have showed in his posture. He looked over at Valentina in a plea for her to back him up.

"I was wondering why I hadn't seen you in a while, Dason," Valentina said, completely ignoring him. "You said you got a new job, that you were working with an entirely different group, that you got a new apartment. I never thought it was because you were seeing her." She gestured at Oriole for emphasis.

Oriole's lip twitched in a snarl.

"Wait..." Valentina said as her face turned to shock. She even raised a hand up to her lips to drive the expression home. "When you went to our vacation spot, were you taking her with you?"

"Wait," Oriole said. "Which vacation spot?"

"Wahoo World."

Oriole actually started growling. A server came over to take their order and immediately walked away to presumably hide behind the counter in order to escape the blast radius.

In actuality, Dason saw that he went back into the kitchen and start to argue with the other servers, only for them to break a couple of spaghetti noodles and draw straws to see who would come back.

The inkling that drew the short straw looked very hesitant.

"Dason..." Oriole snarled.

The worst part was that he couldn't even defend himself by saying that she was lying. She wasn't. Their family had gone to Wahoo World often enough that it could be called their vacation spot, and he had no way out of this that wouldn't result in bloodshed.

"The looks on your faces," Valentina said with a quiver in her voice. Dason and Oriole both looked back at her to see her whole body shaking with giggles. "I can't believe that you actually fell for that."

"Dason..." Oriole snarled again. Her hands were on the table, her knuckles white with the exertion of her grip. "Give me one reason to not tear her throat out right now."

"I'm actually his sister, you're the 'other woman' in regards to being the only other person that's really important in his life," Valentina explained.

"And the Wahoo World trip?" Oriole said, and Dason could hear her beak grinding to dust in sheer rage.

"I arranged it, pulled some strings. Dason wasn't too forthcoming about why he wanted to go there, but I know he had his reasons. My only requirement was that he explain himself in due time, and here you are."

With that, Valentina beamed at Oriole, and some of the tension left the table. The inkling in the kitchen that had drawn the short straw came out and blurted, "Can I take your order?!"

"Round of water and a large pepperoni pizza," Dason said, and the server scuttled off before things could take a turn for the worse again.

The table was silent for a moment, after which Oriole said (quite plainly), "I don't like you."

That only made Valentina burst out laughing, and Oriole's expression darken further.

Somehow, Dason had a feeling that this was still going to end in bloodshed.

"So," Valentina said as their server rushed over with glasses of water and set them down so hastily that Dason's spilled slightly, "How long have you been together?"

Oriole looked over at Dason, her own expression questioning.

How long had they been together? They'd only been official for a couple of days at most, but they'd been hanging out and spending time together for a while.

"A little bit," Dason said noncommitally. Oriole seemed mollified by that answer and returned to glaring at Valentina.

"You two fucked yet?"

Oriole started snarling and Dason kicked his sister under the table.

"Ow!" Valentina yelped. "What was that for?!"

"For being an idiot," Dason replied.

"Okay," Valentina conceded with a shrug.

Good to see that some parts of their dynamic hadn't changed with the passage of time.

"So you're actually his sister?" Oriole asked.

"Yes," Valentina said.

"And you mean that?"

"Of course."

"You mean you're not going to hang out when I'm not around and do that thing that you were just talking about?"

Finally, Valentina looked disgusted. "Eew, no. That would be called incest and anyone that ever thought that Dason and I were a couple should be ashamed of themselves for multiple reasons. That one is close to the top."

Oriole finally wore something that could be technically qualified as a smile. It showed her beak, at the very least.

"And what are the others?"

"He's nasty, smelly, eats weird, and he has never taken that gas mask off since he started wearing it, which means he's even nastier and smellier underneath it. Dirty, stinky, smelly bastard man."

Oriole arched an eyebrow at that. She was finally beginning to believe that they were siblings, just based on how Valentina talked about him.

"You know," Oriole said as Valentina finished up her tirade, "I think I might just believe you. Which of you is the older?"

"I am," Dason said at the exact same moment that Valentina pointed at him.

"By how long?"

"Fourteen months," they replied in unison.

"Well," Oriole said as she leaned back. The server brought out the pizza and set it down before hurrying back to the kitchen and occasionally peeking out. Dason could see the dread on her face as Oriole drank half of her water.

Oriole would need a refill. Which meant another trip to the table. Which meant more stress and possibly pain for the server.

He would have to leave a very hefty tip for her.

"So," Valentina said as she took a slice and began chowing down. "Why now?"

"I said I'd tell you why I needed to go to Wahoo World when I was at liberty to discuss it. Now that Oriole and I are officially together, I could tell you, and now you know," Dason said.

Oriole looked over at Dason and asked, "You used your sister for vacation time?"

"Yes."

"Cold-blooded."

"Just means I can put in some more hours on the splatterfield this year," Valentina said with a shrug.

Dason took a bite of his pizza and said, "I'll owe you one in the future. Promise."

"Debt's paid, big bro," Valentina said. "Especially now that I see this sweet thing you took with. I can't really blame you for keeping her secret."

"Valentina," Dason cautioned. "Please don't flirt with my girlfriend."

There was that word again. He still felt weird using it. Oriole glared at him.

"Dason," Valentina chided, "If I was flirting with your girlfriend, both of you would know. And I would have to be very careful of your feet while we played footsie under the table."

"Please don't flirt with me," Oriole said firmly.

"I won't, I won't," Valentina said, holding up her hands in surrender. "Not when I haven't seen him this happy since his first day of turf war."

Oriole looked over at Dason and smirked. "So you've known him longer than most anyone, right?"

"Yup."

"Got any embarrassing stories?" Oriole asked.

Oh no.

Dason tried to stop Valentina from speaking even as she said, "Well, there was this one time-"

***

"And we're stopping right there," Dason said.

Valentina let out a groan that made Claire and Starkey look over at her. "Come on! You don't want them to know about the time that you got your head stuck inside a mason jar when you were a kid?"

"No."

"Or how you kept on searching for a pasta tree because Dad told you that they existed?"

"I still haven't been proven wrong on that one."

"Or the incident with the pumpkin?"

"They don't need to hear about that."

Starkey looked over at Claire, confusion writ on his face, and mouthed, "Pumpkin incident? What pumpkin incident?"

"Ooooh! Maybe I should show them your baby pictures!" Valentina said as she started to stand up and go over to one of the closets. Dason's hand around her wrist dragged her back to her chair.

"No."

"Awwww, but Oriole has already seen them!"

"I still didn't ask you to come over with armfuls of photo albums," Dason said.

"I... actually want to see those," Claire said as she tentatively raised her hand.

"Come over some other time, because Captain No-Fun here is being the leader of the SS Killjoy," Valentina said as she glared over at Dason.

"You do that, Claire," Dason said warningly, "You're dead to me."

What Dason didn't know wouldn't hurt their friendship.

"So why did you tell us all of this?" Starkey said in a desperate attempt to get the conversation back on track.

"I'd like you two to meet her," Dason explained, "The four of you are the most important people in my life right now, and I want you to all know each other and our respective stories."

"So she knows about..." Claire stared, then trailed off. She was about to ask about her self-harm, but she still felt uncomfortable talking about it.

"I told her about Oakley, yes," Dason said, and Claire internally let out a sigh of relief. It seemed that the weirdest member of their team had at least a little tact.

"So when do we get to meet her?" Starkey asked.

"How does a beach party sound?" Dason said.

"I can get behind that," Starkey agreed, "It'd be good to get some R&R after the mayhem that we've been through recently."

Claire nodded in agreement. Things had been going a little too crazy as of late, and she needed a moment to catch her breath.

"How does next weekend sound?" Dason asked.

"I'll check my calendar," Starkey said, though there was a shine in his eyes that indicated that he had no plans.

"Vale, can you start making the arrangements?" Dason asked.

"I think I can do that," she said as she grabbed her phone and quick-dialed a number. "Hey, Mom! I was wondering if I could ask a favor..."

As she walked off, Claire checked her watch and winced. "Shoot. I should get home. My parents are probably going to be worried sick."

"I'll walk with you," Starkey said as they both rose. He looked over at Dason and said, "Thank you for sharing this with us. I know that it probably took a leap of faith for you to tell us this."

"I've seen your guys' hell. Vale and I just figured it was time that we shared ours with you," Dason said with a shrug. It came out nonchalant, but there was a sense of relief, of satisfaction in his statement that showed that he was glad of this new bond that they had together.

"See you later," Starkey and Claire said as they made their way towards the door. 

"I'll keep you filled in about the plans," Dason said. He put his mask back on and closed the door behind them, then slumped against the wall as his knees gave out under him.

That whole thing had been mentally and emotionally exhausting. If any more people knew the full story, he'd have to count them on two hands, but he didn't really know who else he would ever want to tell, if there was anyone else.

"Thanks, Mom. I love you too. Bye," Valentina said as she ended the call and went over to Dason to help him up. He stayed there, and she sat down next to him.

"Hey, bro. You ok?" she asked with concern.

"I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I don't like keeping secrets from people, and now that everything's out in the open, I don't know what else there will be to talk about." Dason said. He was quickly dozing off right then and there.

Valentina draped one of his arms across her shoulder, then stood up with a grunt, and hauled him up with her. She made her way over to the couch and eased him down. "Crash here tonight. I don't want you passing out on the bus and having some weird guy do weird stuff to you. Or worse, have you miss your stop."

Dason nodded slowly and removed his mask again. He stared up at Valentina, who smiled warmly at him and patted his unburned cheek. "Sleep well, Dason. I'll clean up down here."

Dason smiled at her and started to drift off to sleep.

Everything would be alright.

Of that much, he was certain.


	20. Epilogue

On the subject of Road Trips, people can have a variety of opinions.

Some people love them, and the mere concept of spending a long period of time on the road (ten hours or more, even) is an exhilirating thought because it gives them time to jam out to their favorite music or listen to an audiobook that they really wanted to catch up on. They relish the feeling of open country, and they want nothing more than to discover new places and take the path less traveled. If they are a passenger, they will usually find a way to keep themselves occupied, if not fall asleep outright.

Other people have learned to bear road trips out of necessity. Some people (like a certain author with outstanding warrants in approximately six states, two Canadian Territories, and the isle of Guam), have either forced their body to adapt to the feeling of road trips, or required chemical intervention in order to sustain them on the drive. These people will generally chug energy drinks like they're going out of style, need the more-than-occasional bathroom break, and will grump about the whole situation because they find it unpleasant, but necessary. As passengers, these people will often stare out the window and feel their brain cells committ suicide one by one as they try to process the sheer amount of corn that exists in the state of Nebraska. Rare cases, such as aforementioned author, will be busy playing road trip games or watching for the law in order to make sure that they are able to cross state lines safely.

Claire did not belong to either of these groups.

Instead, she belonged to a third group that is considered an abomination by the first, and distant kin by the second.

She hated road trips.

It didn't matter if it was six hours or just an hour and a half (like the present one), she was miserable the entire time. Every book that she brought along suddenly seemed boring and uninteresting, she had left any and all handheld games at home, and the mere concept of a nap was out of the question. How, under the light of the Great Zapfish, could someone sleep sitting upright, anyways?

To top it all off, what she would have done to pass the time under normal circumstances was completely useless here, to the point where it was potentially risky to try anything even remotely related to sewing.

Threading a needle was next to impossible because of how the car jostled when it hit even the slightest patch of rough road, to say nothing about how that same movement would cause her to prick her fingers so often that she wouldn't be able to hold anything for days afterwards. And, even if she managed to get through that whole mess of nonsense, she would have to suffer the fact that the stitches were spaced too far apart for her standards, and she'd wind up taking a seam ripper to it anyways.

So, as far as road trips were concerned, Claire thought that they were about as enjoyable as reading through a badly-written textbook on tax law.

Fortunately, her father found it enjoyable. The road tripping, of course, not the books on tax law. Even as an accountant, he still shuddered whenever he saw finance textbooks.

"Are you excited, Claire? Two days of a beach all to yourself! That has to be interesting, right?" he said as he glanced over his shoulder at her. They were getting close, at the very least. Claire could smell the sea air, and Charity was looking out the window in hopes of catching a glimpse of the ocean as they ran parallel to the coast.

"It's going to be great," Claire said dryly. She genuinely was looking forward to it, but spending more than thirty minutes in the car at any given time was enough to make her ill-humoured at best, and outright nasty at worst.

Charity wasn't nearly as amused as Michael seemed to be. "You're going to be at a private beach, no chaperones, and Zapfish knows who else is going to be there," she had said when Claire told them about Valentina's arrangements.

To tell the truth, it had been odd, hearing her mother act as the voice of reason.

"Oh, come on, Char," Michael had said as he snaked his arm around his wife's waist. "Let her get into trouble from time to time. It helps her grow. We got into our fair share when we were her age, and it would be unfair to deny her what we could have done at any time."

At that point, the most curious thing had happened.

Charity blushed.

"Fine," she said, "but we're taking you all the way to the beach and making sure you get to the beach house safe."

Michael and Claire had agreed to that, and almost a month later, they were in the car and on their way to Yamapulu Private Beach.

"Oh look!" Charity said, any trace of her apparent apprehension absent from her voice, "You can see the ocean!"

Claire was about to point out that they lived in a port town, complete with a harbor and everything, but she turned her head and her breath caught in her throat.

The ocean was beautiful, seeming to shimmer between a deep indigo and an emerald green, and the lightly clouded sky played shadows across the water as the clouds blew along.

She was going to play in _that_?

Maybe this trip wasn't so bad after all.

Claire kept on staring out the window at the ocean, trying to find shapes in the waves the way that some people would try to find shapes in the clouds. This worked moderately well, and served as a decent way to kill time until the ocean faded out of view and their vehicle dipped back down into a deep forest.

They had been driving in that forest for about fifteen minutes when the car slowed to a stop.

"The hell..." Michael muttered as they halted, and a crab in an immaculate black suit and a pair of high-end sunglasses came up to the window.

Claire looked ahead and saw that the area was fenced off and that the road led straight to a gate.

"Can I help you, bruv?" the crab asked as Michael rolled down his window.

"Yeah, we're looking for Yamapulu Beach," Michael said as he held up his GPS. "Says it's right through here, so can we get through?"

"What's your last name?"

"Cloud," Michael said warily, and the crab walked off. He conferred with his lobster partner, then came back with a nod.

"We got a Cloud on the list, bruv. But my guessin's you're not Claire," the crab said. His voice had a quality to it that made him a little harder to understand, but it was something that Claire could work with for a very short period of time.

"She's in the back," Michael said as he pointed back at his daughter with his thumb. "Could you let us through so we could drop her off?"

"No can do, bruv," the crab said as he straightened up. "Owner's rules. People pay a pretty penny for they's privacy, right? We can give her a ride the rest of the way."

Michael stared at the crab and frowned, his expression clear even through his bushy mustache, then said very firmly, "If anything happens to my daughter, I'm going to break all of your legs and make it look like an accident."

Now it was the crab's turn to frown. "Pretty tough talk coming from a man that represents the Lollipop Guild," he replied.

"I was making my bones when you weren't even a twinkle in your father's eye, you crusty bastard," Michael said, "Don't test me."

They were going to keep on like this until it came to blows, and Charity probably wouldn't even stop them. The crab had touched on one of Mike's berserk buttons: his height.

"I'll be fine, dad," Claire said as she unbuckled and grabbed her backpack o' stuff, and stepped out. "Really, I will."

That cut off any further arguments from Michael, and any further retorts from the security crab.

"If you need anything," Charity said, "Don't hesitate to call. Alright? And be safe."

"I'll be fine," Claire said with a weak smile. "It's just hanging out with the team. You know that they're alright."

Charity nodded acquiesence, and Michael stepped out of the car to give Claire a hug. "We'll pick you up on Sunday, alright?"

"Alright," she agreed before she went through the gate with the security crab. There was a golf cart situated there, and she got into the passenger's seat while the crab turned it on and started to drive.

Even though the cart had a little bit of zip to it, they were still driving for about ten minutes. Claire didn't know what she could have talked about to the security crab, especially considering that he and her father had nearly gotten into a fistfight.

She had to break the silence somehow.

"So, uh..." she started. The crab looked over at her and she could tell that he was frowning. Somehow this was worse than a road trip.

But she wasn't going to be scared of this silence. "Why did we have to wait so long for a reservation?"

The crab shrugged and said, "The Yamapulu Corporation gets a lot of bids coming in for this place. It's kind of what happens when you have a nice place that people want to visit." He said this in a tone that said that what he was saying was completely obvious and that she should have thought of it sooner.

Claire fell silent. It just turned out that this crab was an asshole, then.

Of course, he also turned out to be a completely correct asshole, which is arguably the worst kind. They came in view of the beach and Claire's heart stopped in her throat.

The beach was... iridescent. Every second revealed shimmering colors of greens, blues, and purples in the sand, and she wondered how such a thing could even be real. Off in the distance, there was a bungalow on stilts that was close enough to the water that one could likely wade into the ocean at high tide if they were so inclined. As it was, though, there was a good ten-foot stretch of that shimmering sand between the porch and the waterline.

The security crab parked the car at the end of the laneway that led up to the property, and said, "This is where you get off."

It was only now that Claire realized that she had been sitting there, staring at the picturesque sight for a few seconds after the cart had stopped. She hurriedly muttered something that could be construed as thanks, and climbed off the cart, shouldering her bag and making her way out onto the sand.

Part of her wished that she was wearing sandals. She wanted to feel the sand between her toes and figure out if it was actually real, but there would be plenty of time for that later.

She gave a sharp knock on the door of the bungalow, and Dason threw the door open not a split-second later.

He wasn't wearing his mask.

He was, however, wearing a pair of swim trunks that looked like they had been stolen from Guy Fieri's wardrobe.

Why did guys think that flames on a black background looked good?

Of course, the trunks he was wearing were not nearly as bizarre as the apron he had on. It was a pink number that looked so feminine that she half expected it to have frills, and it had cursive script in shimmering gold across the chest that read "I'm the cook, you know what to do."

"This is a lot to take in," Claire said after an appropriate pause to attempt exactly that.

"Thanks," Dason said, then turned around and headed indoors, not waiting for Claire to catch up. For her part, Claire bustled inside and looked around at the tidy bungalow.

It consisted of three bedrooms, a large living area with a kitchen off to one side, and a large living area that housed the remainder of her team.

Valentina was sprawled out on an armchair with her back against one arm and her legs draped over another. She was speaking in a very animated fashion to Starkey, who sat patiently on the floor by a fireplace, and there was a third person sitting on a couch that had her back towards the front door.

"Hey, Claire!" Valentina said as she waved. Starkey gave a wave of his own, and the third person turned around to stare at Claire.

Her face was expressionless, but Claire could understand the look in her eyes better than she could have imagined. After all, she had probably worn it several times before in the early days of being on the Bad Squiddos.

The octoling girl was screaming internally.

"Hey, guys," Caire said with a wave of her own as she set her bag down and removed her shoes. She made her way deeper into the bungalow, enjoying the feeling of the hardwood floors under her feet, and sat down on the loveseat that faced Valentina's armchair.

Dason had stepped outside, and the smells of grilling were coming from the patio.

Silence reigned.

"So um... you must be Oriole," Claire said, then gave the other girl what she hoped was an inviting smile. After all, she knew all about her, but Oriole likely knew nothing about her.

"That's me," Oriole said, and she gave a shy smile of her own. In that moment, Claire knew that she would be able to get along with this girl. She seemed at least... somewhat normal.

Not that her team was a group of bad people, but they could be a bit much at times. It was going to be nice spending time with someone that wasn't hard to read, chaotic as hell, or a combination of the two.

"Starkey and Valentina have been filling me in about you," Oriole said, and the smile turned genuine. "Seems like you've got your own crazy adventures, huh?"

So they'd been talking about Oakley. Or, more accurately, Valentina had been. Starkey wasn't the kind of guy to fixate on the past like that. Especially not the ugly past.

"Yeah, that was... a weird few months," Claire admitted as she rubbed the back of her neck.

"Trust me, I get it," Oriole said, "My life has just been strange since I met Dason."

"I heard that!" Dason said from the patio.

"Tell me I'm wrong!" Oriole hollered back without skipping a beat.

Dason remained silent. There was only grilling sounds now.

"So... what's up with that beach?" Claire said in an attempt to break the silence.

"OH!" Valentina said as she decided to sit like a normal person. She started bouncing up and down in her chair as she explained. "It's glass!"

Suddenly, Claire was no longer excited to walk on the beach, and was very glad that she had worn her sneakers.

As if reading her mind, Valentina explained further. "No, no, no, it's not sharp or anything. Apparently there used to be a huge landfill out on the water that sank, and it had a lot of glass bottles, and over time they broke, eroded, and washed up on this beach, making it look rad as fuck!"

"Glass comes from sand anyways," Starkey said as if to appease Claire further. Somehow, hearing it from his mouth made her feel a lot better about the whole thing.

"It looks pretty," she said, but couldn't really say anything else on the matter.

Starkey looked over at Oriole and asked, "So you're trying to get into the Turf War League?"

"Yeah, but my massive cunt of a caseworker hasn't processed me yet. This bitch Kamila needs to get her shit straight and fast. My application has been sitting on her desk for at least a year, now."

Claire looked at Valentina. For some reason, Valentina's expression looked like she really wished she had a cup of tea to sip nonchalantly in an attempt to hide any sort of involvement with this Kamila person.

It was a very specific expression.

It was only then that what Oriole had said finally registered, and Claire stared at her with a wide-mouthed expression. "You shouldn't call her that!"

"What? A cunt?" Oriole said with a shrug. "She is, though. You don't just let someone's application sit there for that long, regardless of whether or not I'm an octoling. Isn't that right, sweetie?"

"Damn skippy!" Dason called back from the patio.

Zapfish above... Oriole didn't know.

If she found out that Dason's alleged mother was her caseworker, there would be hell to pay. Suddenly, Claire wished she had a cup of tea as well.

"Does anyone want tea?" Claire asked as she stood up and made her way into the kitchen.

"Please," Starkey and Valentina said in unison.

"Oriole?" Claire asked as she went to the cabinets and started rummaging through in order to find what she needed.

"I could go for a cup, sure," Oriole replied nonchalantly.

Claire got out four mugs and teabags, then set a pot of water on to boil. The bungalow didn't have a proper kettle, so she was going to have to be very steady with her pour. Of course, part of her training with her splatling had been to make sure that her hands remained steady even when they did not want to.

The water came to a boil just as Dason came back inside with a cutting board piled high with burgers, hot dogs, and steaks. It looked like enough food for twelve people, not the meager five that they were. He set it down and went back out before returning with another cutting board piled with grilled eggplant, zucchini, and squash.

For a moment, Claire had worried about Dason's diet.

"Alright, folks, soup's on," he called out, "Come and get it."

The other three rose as one, and Claire handed out mugs of tea while Dason retrieved a can of cola from the fridge and cracked it open, taking a long drink.

It was still really unsettling to see Dason eating food like a normal person.

Once they were all seated at the coffee table with their meal, Claire asked, "So... can you do your food thing even without the mask?"

Oriole and Valentina groaned together, and began saying overlapping things that were in the same vein.

"Come on, don't do that!"

"It's weird enough with the mask on!"

"Please don't! It's creepy!"

At that last one from Valentina, Dason pointed a piece of steak on a fork and said, "It's not as creepy as what you can do!"

The group fell silent and stared over at Valentina with expectant expressions.

"Valentina," Starkey said, "Is there something you'd like to share with the class?"

Valentina frowned at Starkey, then turned her ire onto Dason and gave him the finger. "Fuck you, bro. Just fuck you."

With that, she picked up a piece of grilled zucchini and squeezed it in her hand.

Claire watched in absolute shock as the ends of zucchini on either side of her hand dropped onto the plate, then Valentina presented her surprisingly clean palm to the group. "There! You happy now?!"

The room was silent. Oriole broke it by asking, "How...?"

"Something about osmosis, I don't know. We don't get it from our mother, that's for certain," Valentina muttered as she went back to eating like a normal person.

If there had been any doubt before, Claire now knew that Dason and Valentina were related. There was no way that they could be that strange and not have a blood relation of some kind.

"So what does it-" Starkey started to ask.

"We're not speaking of this again," Valentina cut him off flatly. Clearly she was embarrassed by her weird eating power, while Dason seemed to revel in it. At that moment, he speared another piece of steak on the end of his fork and clacked his teeth together a good foot away from the morsel.

It still disappeared.

Somehow, that was more disconcerting than his ability to eat with the gas mask on.

After dinner, Oriole and Claire were left to do the dishes while Valentina and Starkey put away the leftovers for eating over the weekend.

They talked while they worked, naturally.

"I've not really heard a lot about Grizzco aside from what Dason has said. What's it like?" Claire asked, even though she probably already knew the answer.

"The pay sucked until it didn't, the boss is a jerk with no sense of morality, and the work is life-threatening. Probably the worst job I've ever had... wait, no. Second worst."

Claire blinked and paused halfway through putting away one of the plates. "Second worst? What was the worst?"

"I delivered newspapers," Oriole said flatly.

That didn't sound too bad. Claire said so.

"I had to wake up at a terrible hour of the morning, bike through this upper-class neighborhood, and as more and more people woke up, it would get worse and worse," Oriole explained, "You had the stupid kids with slingshots that thought it would be funny to launch rocks at me. I got knocked off my bike twice in the first week by those sociopathic bastards.

"Then you have the guys that don't ever pay for their newspapers. I have to chase them down saying that 'I want my two dollars' every time they refused. Print was dying, which meant that my route became insanely huge and I wanted to fucking die by the time I got home."

At that, Dason shot her a worried look.

"We're past that, Dason. You know that we are," she said before she looked back to Claire, "And the worst part was that I couldn't even throw the papers at anything valuable, because then I get charged with destruction of property. It sucked."

That last bit made Claire giggle slightly, and they put away the last of the dishes together.

"Well... I'm hoping that your application to the Turf War League gets passed through soon," Claire said, "It'll be nice to be able to play with you."

Oriole gave her own smile at that in return. "I'd ask if I could join your team," she said, "But since you already have four people, I think that the best thing for me would be to be an alternate at best, a solo at worst."

"You don't want to join this mayhem," Dason said from the couch. "Trust me."

"And why not?" Oriole asked.

"Crazy exes," Starkey said.

"Revenge plots," Valentina added.

"Existential crises," Claire muttered.

Oriole was quiet for a minute, then shrugged. "So no worse than what I've gone through already. Minus the crazy exes part."

The whole bungalow went dead silent for a bit before Dason started chuckling. It erupted into full-on laughter after a moment, and Valentina wasn't far behind in her own chortles. Even Starkey wore a small smile and shook his head like he was a dad looking at his kids just as they were about to go and cause that special kind of trouble that kids did.

Claire couldn't help but join in.

Oriole wasn't the only one laughing, and instead looked at the four of them before saying, "What?"

"If you've been through as much as we have," Valentina said, then added, "And it sounds like you might be in the running. If that's the case, then you might fit right in as an honorary member."

Starkey shrugged and said, "I wouldn't be opposed to it, to tell the truth. If you want to tag in when one of us is out, we'll be happy to have you."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Dason said as he sat bolt upright. "I didn't agree to this! Aren't you worried about Oriole and I distracting each other on the field?"

"Claire and I don't distract each other," Starkey replied. He then coughed and amended his statement with, "Anymore at least."

"Oh, so you've fucked," Valentina said nochalantly. She recieved a Claire-lobbed roll of paper towels to the head for her trouble, which only sparked more laughter.

"What was that for?!" Valentina protested.

"For being an idiot," Dason said before Claire or Starkey could speak up.

"Okay," Valentina said with a shrug of her own.

"So..." Claire said once the laughter had died down, "What else do we have planned for tonight?"

"Board games, card games, and s'mores," Valentina said. Dason was already moving to his bag and removing a couple of bags of marshmallows and bars of chocolate, then the graham crackers.

They didn't have the chance to enjoy those at Camp Triggerfish, Claire realized. It was nice that they were able to at least do that here.

Starkey made up the fireplace while Valentina retrieved a handful of board game boxes from a shelf, then put a couple back upon realization that they were four players max.

"So we have it narrowed down to Clue, Risk, Monopoly, and card games," Valentina said as she put the boxes out.

"No Monopoly," Dason said firmly.

"Why not?" Starkey asked.

Dason put a marshmallow on a skewer and put it over the fire, toasting it on all sides with a practiced hand. "Do you know the difference between Splatfest and Monopoly?"

The room was quiet, which seemed to be a pretty solid example of a "No."

"One is a no-holds-barred, cutthroat contest where people try to take what they can, give nothing back, and turn against their friends, families, and loved ones. The other has really cute idols dancing on top of trucks," Dason said.

Considering how heated Splatfests could get at times, it definitely fit the bill.

"Risk takes forever," Starkey said as he put the boxes away.

"What card games did you have in mind?" Claire asked as Starkey removed the offending amusements.

"Poker," Valentina said.

"We don't have anything to bet with," Oriole said.

There was a pause before Valentina said, "Strip poker?"

"Clue it is," Claire, Starkey, and Oriole said together. Dason looked incredibly uncomfortable at the fact that Valentina would mention such a thing when her brother was right there in the room.

They got everything together and set out the pieces. Dason got to dual-wielding the skewers with marshmallows on them in order to make sure everyone got their s'more at the ready, even as they chose their characters.

Oriole didn't hesitate taking the blue piece indicating Ms. Peacock. Claire played Ms. White, Dason was Mr. Green, Starkey was Professor Plum, and Valentina chose Ms. Scarlett.

Truth be told, the game went by relatively quickly. Starkey's analytical mind figured out that it was Ms. Peacock, in the kitchen, with the knife, and Oriole threw up her hands in disappointment at herself.

"Why would I do that?!" she said, and everyone shared a chuckle at that.

There was enough time for another round of s'mores but not another game. Outside was dark, and Valentina patted Starkey's knee before saying, "Get your snack and go out onto the patio! I heard that this place was really cool after dark!"

Claire looked over at Starkey, who only blinked in confusion, then toasted his marshmallow over the fire and stepped outside. Claire and Oriole were slower in following, as Dason opted out of having a second.

In part, it was because he was threatening to eat weird if everyone didn't let him win. It didn't work.

Once Claire stepped outside, though, she saw a sight unlike any that she'd seen before.

The ocean was glowing, and parts of the beach were too.

"There's this bioluminescent algae that comes up at night in this area," Valentina explained as she looked out at the water and leaned on the railing. It was high tide, so the water lapped against the stilts of the bungalow and splashed up onto the deck occasionally. Claire barely heard her, she was so in awe.

"I guess that's why they charge so much for reservations," Starkey commented. Apparently, he'd looked at the place online as well.

"Wait..." Oriole said as she looked over at Valentina. In the glow of the algae, plus the light from inside the bungalow, Claire could see that her eyes were narrowing. "How do you have this much money?"

"It's not my money," Valentina said as she raised a finger in admonition. "It's my mom's money."

"So you're one of those annoying rich kids, huh?" Oriole said with a touch of annoyance as she looked back at the ocean.

"What does that make me, then?" Dason protested.

"You're not annoying. You're just weird."

Another moment passed, then it seemed like a lightbulb went off in Oriole's head. "Wait. Your last name was on the reservation at the hotel that Dason and I stayed at when we went to Wahoo World."

"Yes. I had my mom place the reservation for you two," Valentina confirmed.

"The last name was 'Brook.'"

"That's our last name."

"It's also the name of my caseworker."

Valentina blanched.

"Is your mother the cockjuggling thundercunt that has had my fucking application sitting on her desk for over a year, and has done nothing about it?" Oriole said, her voice full of venom.

Valentina paused, then jumped off the deck and into the shallow ocean with a shout of "JACKNIFE!"

"YOU GET BACK HERE!" Oriole hollered as she jumped over the railing as well, but Valentina was already wading out of the waist-deep water and running down the beach screaming maniacally as Oriole chased her.

"Just another day in the life," Starkey sighed as one woman chased the other around the beach. For what it was worth as the other three watched, Valentina had jukes for days. Oriole fell flat on her face twice.

"Unfortunately," Dason said with a genuine laugh as he bellied up alongside Starkey on the railing.

"It is beautiful, though," Claire commented, then yawned.

"Tired?" Starkey asked as he glanced at her.

"A bit. I don't do well on the road," she said.

"Then we can go to bed. Just give me a minute to get changed," Starkey said before rubbing her back and stepping inside.

Valentina seemed to have a sixth sense for this sort of thing, because there was no way that she could have heard when she was fifty feet away, and Oriole was throwing a slew of curses at her that would make a sailor blush.

She stopped dead and said, "Wait, are you two going to bed?! You better not be sharing a room because that will mean that I'm the only one by myself on account of my bro-"

Valentina was cut off by Oriole tackling her and proceeding to drag her into the ocean.

"Hey!" Dason shouted as he vaulted the railing and went after the pair.

This was more than enough ridiculous for the day, Claire decided. Hell, after everything that she'd been through since she met Starkey, she'd had enough ridiculous to last a lifetime, even though she wasn't really sure if she'd escape the insanity of life that easily.

She went back inside and saw Starkey stepping out of the bathroom in a pair of pajama bottoms as he pulled a clean, white t-shirt over his head.

Claire considered herself blessed that she got to see an expanse of Starkey's chest and abs before the shirt covered them, then chastised herself for thinking of such a thing so blatantly.

Starkey pulled his head through the hole of the shirt, then froze in the way that he had so many times before. Any other man might have wood hard enough to crack steel, but Starkey just stared at her as she stared at him, then excused himself to the room that the two of them were, presumably, meant to share.

Claire ducked into the bathroom and changed into her own jammies hastily, and blushed at the thought that the bedclothes that she favored were not that different from what Starkey had been wearing.

She plucked up her bag from the bathroom floor and went into the room that Starkey had gone into, then paused. Starkey was standing at the foot of the bed (singular) and staring at it quite intently.

"There's only one bed," Starkey said, taking home the Academy Award for Stating the Obvious.

"I see that," Claire said, coming in as a close second for that award.

"I can ask Oriole to switch with me, if that's okay," Starkey said, but Claire was hasty to respond.

"No, no... it's alright. I'm fine with... this," she said, gesturing feebly at the bed. "Besides," she said with a nervous laugh, "All of your stuff is in here already, right?"

Starkey shot a glance over to the dresser that likely already housed all of his clothes. "Right."

He shifted that same unreadable gaze back over to her and said with a face that would have been unreadable if it wasn't dusted with color across what Claire thought were perfect cheekbones, "Are you sure?"

"I am," Claire said. Like a liar.

"If my mom finds out, she'll probably cheer. If dad finds out, he'll probably kill you on principle," Claire continued with a laugh that was meant to lighten the mood, but came out as more of a nervous thing that said that she didn't want to be in this situation at all.

Starkey paled and cleared his throat. He remembered the threats that Michael had delivered just before their trip to Camp Triggerfish, then nodded. "No funny business, then. We keep to our sides of the bed."

"I think I'll be okay with that," Claire said as she set her bag down and made her way over to one side. "No promises I won't wake you up in the middle of the night as I move, though."

"I won't blame you," Starkey said in return as he went over to his own side and turned off the lamp. Claire turned out her own and wreathed the room in darkness, save for the soft glow of the algae through the window.

She and Starkey got into bed together (a thought that made Claire sit on the edge of the bed and force her heart rate to slow down [a futile effort]), and lay down together. The bed was big enough that they were able to lay down with a foot of space between them, and Starkey muttered, "Goodnight, Claire," as he lay on his back and closed his eyes.

"Goodnight," Claire said in return as she rolled onto her side and closed her eyes.

***

When Claire woke up, she was laying on something that was much warmer and much harder than a pillow.

There was also the steady ba-dump-ba-dump that came from whatever she was laying on.

As a general rule, when people wake up, they are disoriented, confused, and all-around out of it.

Claire was no exception. After she opened her eyes, it took a moment for her brain to boot up, and when it was fully operational... well.

Her cheek was pressed to Starkey's pectoral. That explained the heart beating. Additionally, she was sprawled across the remainder of the bed to the point that she was taking up almost two-thirds of the bed's real estate.

Claire sat up, and felt Starkey's hand move off the small of her back to flop onto the bed. She froze for a moment, worried that she woke him, but all she got was a mutter of "Fite me one-on-one..." from Starkey before he rolled onto his side and fell back asleep.

Crisis averted.

She crept out of the room, snagging her change of clothes and grooming kit as she went. Once she was free of the confines that she had shared with Starkey for the better part of eight hours, she ducked into the bathroom and took a quick shower.

The water was hot, which meant that nobody else had wakened just yet (far as she could tell), and she was quick in getting out and getting dressed. Today, she figured, she would wear a baby blue swimsuit underneath a pair of baggy grey shorts and a white tank top with a shimmering bronze Taurus zodiac sign on the front.

When she turned into the kitchen, she was first assaulted by the smell of well-brewed coffee, then second by the sight of Valentina sitting at the island in a bikini top with a bruise on her cheek.

"Sup," Valentina said.

Claire just stared.

"Oriole gave me a good one," Valentina said. "She would have given me a few more if Dason hadn't pulled her off me."

"Why?!" Claire asked in quiet exasperation.

"My mom is the..." she cleared her throat and did her best impression of Oriole's somewhat-deeper voice, "'Cockjuggling thundercunt' that's handling her case."

Claire didn't say anything. She instead went into the fridge and withdrew a bottle of orange juice before pouring herself a cup. Valentina looked like she was drinking a cup of coffee with too much cream and probably just as much sugar.

"So what did you do?" Claire asked.

"Sent a text to my mom. Told her that I'd heard from a handful of people that 'Kamila Brook hadn't passed through their applications yet.'"

Claire didn't say anything. Instead, she pondered about what effect that would have. Maybe Kamila was neglecting part of her work, or maybe she was so prideful that she thought that sort of thing was beneath her. Either way, it might have an effect.

Mainly, Claire wanted to play with Oriole.

"So... what do we have for breakfast?" Claire asked.

"Bacon, eggs, bits and bobs. I had an apple," Valentina said with a shrug.

Claire frowned at that and stood up again.

"What are you doing?"

"Making breakfast. You're going to help me," Claire said as she went to the fridge. There were basics in there, as well as whatever her teammates had brought along.

From the abundance of meat in the fridge, Dason and/or Starkey had contributed quite a bit.

What was it with men and a red-meat diet?

Claire withdrew a carton of eggs, a brick of cheese, some vegetables, and a few other things.

"Grate that," Claire said as she lobbed the brick towards Valentina. She got to work while Claire diced onions, green and red bell peppers, and set them to cook in a pan while she whisked together a mess of eggs.

That done, she poured them in a buttered twelve-inch pan over low heat and covered them, occasionally tossing the vegetables and pushing in the edges of the eggs in order to make sure that it all cooked, and steamed itself to make a very fluffy omlette.

Once Valentina had enough cheese shredded, Claire put the veggies and cheese on half of the steamed magnificence and folded the other half over the top, then covered it again to let the cheese melt and the eggs finish cooking.

"Wake Oriole and Dason. I'll get Starkey," Claire said as she made her way towards the appropriate room.

She ducked into the room and gently roused Starkey from rest. What came out of his mouth was either another language or gibberish that sounded like "I am lord death cuddlespoon..."

"Breakfast is almost ready," Claire said, and Starkey nodded.

Just at that moment, Valentina chose a less tactful approach. "Less tactful approach" is a phrase which here means "hammering on her brother's door and hollering 'HEY LOVEBIRDS WAKE UP FOOD'S READY.'"

It was a matter of minutes before they were all situated around the island and eating together. Starkey, of course, gave compliments on her cooking as he had when he'd been invited over to dinner that one night. Oriole and Valentina both ate voraciously, while Dason picked at his food with the expression of an old lady in a Wendy's commercial.

"Where's the beef?" that face seemed to ask.

"Eat up, big bro," Valentina said as she elbowed Dason, and he glared at her before forcing another bite of the omlette into his mouth.

"I'll need to get showered," Starkey said as he rose and started to do the dishes, "But after that, we can hit the beach. Looks like a beautiful day, just enough clouds to make it shady sometimes."

Claire started to work with him, but he pushed her away, saying, "Remember your family's rules. You cook, you don't clean. DASON!"

The last word wasn't a shout. It was just loud. He still managed to keep the level affect of his voice while still projecting it with enough force to make Dason jump and make his way over to Starkey to help dry and put the dishes away.

"Guess I better help," Oriole said before she moved around the table and gave Claire a quick hug. "Thanks for making breakfast."

Just as soon as she released Claire, she pointed an accusing finger at Valentina and said, "And fuck you for waking us up."

Valentina gave a finger in return, just not the same one that Oriole had proffered. Valentina wore a smile the entire time.

"We might as well set up on the beach," Valentina said as she went over to the storage area and withdrew a stack of beach towels and handed them off to Claire. For her part, Valentina took out three beach umbrellas, and they went outside.

It was low tide, and Valentina set up shop just outside the reach of where high tide would be, though Claire doubted they would be out that long.

She spread out two towels under one umbrella, two under another, and one under a third. Valentina muttered something about "being the fifth wheel" and stabbed the umbrellas into the ground with even more violence than was warranted.

"Well," Dason said as he stepped out onto the patio with those same Guy Fieri trunks and a towel draped across his bare shoulders, "We have beef for dinner, but I don't think you want that, based on what Claire cooked up for breakfast."

Claire started to speak before Starkey stepped in to save her bacon. "Valentina, you have some ideas about what we could do?"

"There are some tide pools not too far from here. I figure we could go foraging, get a shellfish boil going tonight?" she offered.

"I think I saw some buckets in the storage room," Oriole said before ducking back inside. Claire saw that she was wearing a pair of white swim trunks with red flower print and a matching top, though it wasn't the same style as the bikini that Valentina wore.

Once her eyes settled on Starkey, though, she had to turn away.

Even though Starkey was wearing a pair of solid navy-blue swim trunks and the t-shirt from the previous night instead of, say, a speedo and nothing else, Claire felt heat rising to her face. She suddenly felt that, compared to Valentina's bikini and Oriole's custom two-piece, her lime-green one-piece might be a little modest for his tastes.

Then again, she was likely worrying too much.

She and Starkey were dating. Dason and Oriole were dating. Valentina was...

Well, she didn't know what Valentina was, but based on her complaints, her relationship status was probably "single."

Oriole came back out with two buckets in each hand and passed one each off to Dason and Starkey, then pressed another one into Valentina's hands.

"Why am I carrying this?!" Valentina crowed in indignation.

"Because I'm going to ask Claire to cook because it seems like Dason only knows how to barbecue and she seems reasonably competent!" Oriole said right back. "I'm not going to have her doing heavy lifting on top of that!"

Valentina grumbled and marched along, leading the way to the tide pools.

The tide pools were full when they got there, even though the water was slowly but surely inching their way back towards them with each hour that passed. In fact, some of them were quite large, hosting a microcosm of sea and shore life in their depths as they approached.

Immediately, Starkey dipped his bucket into the water and filled it halfway with the ocean. At questioning glances from Dason and Valentina, he said, "So what we catch doesn't die on the walk back."

Everyone with a bucket followed suit at that point.

After that began the foraging.

Dason, surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that it was Dason), pulled out a knife and got to work on oysters and clams that were fastened to the sides of the tide pools, prying them off with some difficulty and tossing them in his bucket.

Claire, for her part, went around looking for various sea creatures that she knew were edible. There were crabs galore, and she reached in to grab them, but paused when they started to angrily snap their claws at her.

"Hold on," Oriole said as she came up alongside Claire. "You have to grab them from the butt, basically. No pointy bits."

She demonstrated, reaching in and deftly grabbing the crab behind its rear limbs, and tossing it into her own bucket.

"How did you know how to do that?" Claire asked in mild awe as she emulated Oriole's technique and withdrew two of her own to drop into the bucket.

"It just seemed like the reasonable option," Oriole said with a shrug. "They can't poke at you, and you get to manhandle them however you want. Then again, there's a lot of things you can manage when you grab them by the butt."

Claire didn't miss the quick glance that she shot over to Dason, who just so happened to be bending over to presumably pry a mollusk off the stones of the tide pool.

Considering that Dason was holding a knife (as well as Valentina's black eye), Claire opted not to say anything on the matter.

They worked in the sun for the better part of two hours, and Starkey called all of them to the shade after fifteen minutes so they could apply sunblock.

"I won't have anybody looking like they've been on a griddle," he'd said as he sprayed Oriole's back for her.

In all honesty, Claire couldn't fault him for being sensible.

Claire and Oriole worked together to snag crabs. Dason and Valentina gathered mussels, clams, and oysters with his knife and a sharp rock that she found on the shoreline.

Starkey did what he could, but he didn't interfere with his friends' efforts, instead choosing to pluck up what he found at the tide pools that he could.

It was a vast expanse, all things considered, and they all struggled with their buckets when they went back. Claire helped Oriole with hers, and they were several steps ahead of the rest of the group as a result.

"So how did you meet Dason?" Claire asked. She'd already heard Dason's side of the story, but she was sure that Oriole could shed some light onto the meeting that Dason had neglected.

"We met at Grizzco. I saved his life," Oriole said. Claire nodded in understanding.

"I heard something about a Maws, but I'd like to hear more." This was a lie of omission, Claire told herself. She just told part of the truth in order to get the full truth in return.

"So picture this," Oriole said as she gestured with her free hand. "I see these morons that are acting like they're hollering bullshit from the bench in an amateur hockey league, and then I see this Maws running up behind this absolute assclown that's wearing non-Grizzco gear."

"I heard that!" Dason hollered behind them. Based on the impacts on sand, he was trying to catch up.

"This guy has such bad tunnel vision," Oriole continued, as if she hadn't heard, "That he was trying to make his way to the basket and didn't even notice the beacon of the Maws right behind him. Big bitch jumps up and tries to eat him, and I throw a bomb right in her mouth just in time for him to plop back down and dunk the last egg."

Dason caught up at that point. He hadn't really heard anything aside from the accusation of him being an assclown, apparently, and he was panting as he asked, "What were you telling her?"

"I was just telling her about how we met, babe," Oriole said before she leaned over and placed a quick kiss on his cheek.

Dason melted, and then melted into the background.

Oriole, for her part, leaned over and whispered in Claire's ear, "I'm still better than him, but don't tell him that. It'll chap his ass something fierce."

The urge to laugh welled up in Claire's throat, and she couldn't contain it as it erupted forth, prompting more angry hollers from Dason.

Once they were back at the bungalow, Claire got to raiding the cabinets for spices. Turns out that the kitchen was well-stocked, and they were able to wrangle up the appropriate materials for a crab/clam boil.

"Too bad there isn't any corn," Starkey muttered.

"At least there are potatoes," Valentina said in hopes that it would hearten the situation.

"Yeah, but that's for a crawfish boil," Starkey protested, "We need us some corn."

"It's not in season," Dason said as he put lids on top of the buckets of crabs that Oriole and Starkey had brought back in order to keep them inside. "We'll make do with what we have. Want me to throw a couple of burgers on?"

"No," everyone else replied, almost in unison. They'd had beef last night, anyways. It would be nice to have variety while they were on vacation.

Claire got to putting the clams into a pot and shucking the oysters. She hadn't had a lot of experience with this, so it required a lot of working of the knife (and, after a fashion, coaching Oriole to do the same once her hands got tired).

Oriole turned out to be a quick hand with the knife, and nearly threw it at Dason at one point.

"Oriole," Dason had said as he snagged a crab from the bucket with only a couple of comments of "ow, ow, let go of me you bastard."

He held up a purple crab that made Oriole's face darken. "Don't you find this one... crabtivating?" he asked.

It was at that point that Claire had to peacefully stop Oriole from launching a sharp object across the room.

"We had one like that shortly after we met each other," Oriole explained quietly, that way no one else could hear.

She quickly added, "I'll take care of the crabs. You keep on working on the oysters."

Claire supposed it was for the best, especially considering that she didn't really have any experience with killing crustaceans.

She almost regretted it when Oriole snatched the purple crab from Dason's hands and immediately drove a knife in just behind the front of the shell. From what Claire had heard, the method was quick and painless to the crustacean, and was certainly more humane than dropping them live into a pot of boiling water.

Within moments, they had two dozen oysters shucked and plated, a pot of clams and mussels boiling, and another pot of water ready for the crabs that Oriole had taken care of.

This was, of course, to say nothing of the fact that they still had plenty of crabs on hand to make another pot by themselves.

Claire brought the oysters out to the table and set them down. There had been lemons in the fridge (presumably to go with the full liquor cabinet that Claire had immediately closed upon seeing), and she had cut them into wedges for a little extra flavor to the oysters.

"Shame we didn't find any pearls," Valentina commented after her first one.

"I would have called dibs," Oriole muttered, then ate her oyster.

"I've heard that oysters are an aphrodisiac," Starkey commented offhand.

The entire party stopped.

"Don't do this to me," Valentina said.

"Do what?" Dason asked.

"You gave me the master bedroom out of pity, I have an umbrella to myself, I heard you two getting busy when I woke you up today-" Valentina said.

"We were not!" Oriole protested.

"You punched me in the face for my mother's bullshit!" Valentina shot back, "You have no room to talk!"

With that she turned back to Starkey. "Don't tell me that you and Claire are going to be doing the nasty while I have to jill myself off to get a decent night's rest!"

"Valentina, come on! That was way too much information!" Dason said as he rested his head in his hands. Even though Claire was on his scarred side, she could still read his expression well enough to tell that he was on the verge of screaming externally as well as internally.

"I'm the only one not getting laid here!" Valentina said in exasperation.

Starkey raised his hand and said, "I'm not getting laid either, if that helps."

Claire flushed deeply at the mere thought of having sex with Starkey. Not like that would ever happen. Would it? Could it? She didn't know if she would be able to handle the embarrassment if it did.

Oriole shrugged and said, "I mean, it's been a few days for us. We haven't been getting busy since we got here, and things were a bit hectic with packing beforehand. So I think it's safe to say that this is a celibacy zone."

Valentina was only slightly placated by that offering as she crossed her arms and muttered under her breath "I'll kick you in the celibacy zone..."

Fortunately, the rest of the meal passed without incident. They even encouraged Valentina to do her weird eating trick again with a crab leg. This time, she just smushed it against her forehead and absorbed it that way.

After that, it was time for games.

"Alright, folks," Dason said after the dishes were done and the incidental leftovers were put away. He was holding a deck of cards and shuffling them expertly. "The name of the game is Stomp the Wombat. We're playing Copenhagen rules. Big blind is a single sock, small blind is an earring. Sound good?"

"I have no idea what 'Stomp the Wombat' is," Starkey said, "But it sounds like you're proposing we play Strip Poker."

Dason was silent for a moment before he replied only, "And?"

"No," Starkey said firmly at the exact same time that Valentina screamed, "YEAHHHH!"

"I'm in," Oriole said with a shrug. "I'm not related to anyone here."

Claire and Starkey both stared at her in shock, to which she replied. "I didn't know you. I wasn't sure I'd be comfortable getting down into my skivvies with you around. But, after today, I feel like I can trust you and I know that you two won't go telling tales out of school. Does that answer work for you?"

Claire felt her face heating up and she shook her head.

"I'll meet you two in the middle," Dason said as he stood up and went back into the games closet. He returned with a turnabout that was full of poker chips.

"Why didn't you bring those out in the first place?" Starkey asked.

"Because I kind of want to play strip poker, now," Dason said with a shrug. "Not to the nude, just to underwear. Buy-in is your socks. Each article of clothing after that will be an additional buy-in if you run out of chips."

"I don't understand any of this," Claire said despondently.

"Give me your socks and I'll give you chips. Let's start with that."

Claire reluctantly obliged him, only removing her socks once she saw that everyone else was doing the same. Dason dished out ten white chips, five red, and three blue. In order, they were worth one, five, and ten.

"Right, let's get started," Dason said as he started dealing cards.

Turns out that "Stomp the Wombat" was a game that was played similar to Texas Hold 'Em, but everyone put cards on their foreheads instead of having them all presented on the table. However, since in traditional Hold 'Em, there were five cards on the table, and you could only see four forehead cards, a fifth had to be placed in the middle.

"That's what I meant when I said 'Copenhagen Rules,'" Dason explained as he dealt and everyone started playing. "Different rules for different numbers of people."

"If you have six?" Starkey asked.

"Traditional rules."

"What about four?"

"Brussels rules."

"You make no sense."

"I know."

As it turned out, Claire was absolute garbage at poker.

Within the first four turns, even with both Dason and Starkey explaining the rules to her, she was out half of her chips, and another two left her with none in front of her.

Claire started to take off her shirt and turn it in only for Dason to hold up his hand. "Nope."

"I want to keep playing, though..." Claire murmured, though she lowered the hem of her shirt back down to her waist.

"I was messing with you," Dason said as he slid another stack of chips over to her.

"Then why did you take my socks?"

"Honestly, I have no idea," Dason said, which prompted a sharp look from Oriole.

"Are you always this weird around them?" she asked.

"Yes," Starkey and Claire said in unison. Claire blushed.

"You're not this weird around me," Oriole said.

"But I could be."

"I'll have to think on that..." Oriole replied with a sly smirk on her lips just as Valentina smacked Dason upside the head.

"YOU CUCK!" she shouted, and Starkey had to grab Valentina by the back of her collar to stop her from lunging across the table to strangle Dason.

"What?!" Dason said, honestly offended. He scooted away as Starkey struggled to hold Valentina back with an iron grip.

"I wanted to see some skin! Maybe actually have something to fuel my fantasies, but noooooo, you just had to cockblock me even from myself!"

"I wasn't cockblocking you! I was saving a friend from embarrassment!"

Claire blushed even darker.

"You absolute cuck!" Valentina said even as she struggled against Starkey's grip.

"Fine, I guess I really will cockblock you, now!" Dason snapped right back.

"You two argue like an old married couple," Oriole muttered.

"Zip it!" Valentina said as she was forced back into her seat with a sharp exhalation, after which she sat there like a child who had been stopped mid-temper-tantrum.

Though, to tell the truth, that was what she was.

"Maybe we should switch over to Monopoly?" Claire suggested.

"And have a repeat of the same scene?" Starkey said. "I don't think so."

"Strip Monopoly?" Valentina suggested, to which the entire table gave an emphatic "No."

Claire sighed and stood up while everyone else turned in their chips. She rummaged through the board games, muttering the names to herself as she did.

"Trouble... Sorry... Connect Four... Backgammon... Mousetrap... Jumanji..."

That one seemed to rumble with the sound of drums as she touched it. Claire tried to ignore that fact and claim that it was a figment of her imagination.

"Risk... Uno... Trivial Pursuit... ooh!" She stumbled across a game that she had never seen before and brought it out.

"How about this one? 'Arkham Horror?' Sounds like it could be fun."

Claire set it down and took out a board that looked like a map of the city. She read the rules out to everyone and revealed that the game was similar to Clue, where everyone played a character. However, those characters each had different strengths and weaknesses, and that everyone was supposed to work together in order to stop the arrival of an elder god in the city of Arkham.

Turns out, it was quite fun.

The first time that they played through, Valentina was so vindictive in trying to throw Dason under the bus that everyone died with the arrival of Yog-Sothoth. The second game, however, they managed to stop the arrival of Cthulu, and the third game, they managed to kill the Ancient One named Yig, which everyone considered a high point for the night.

"Fuck yeah!" Valentina said as she landed the killing blow on the Ancient One, prompting cheers from everyone else at the table, then flopped back in the armchair. "I'm bushed. Are you guys bushed?"

Everyone gave tired agreements, and she let out a long sigh. "We still have to tidy up before we check out tomorrow. Can that wait?"

"I think so," Starkey said. "From the looks of things, we just have to pack up, put away the dishes, and make sure that we're not leaving our leftovers in the fridge."

"What about all the other crabs?" Oriole asked.

"I'll release them back into the ocean," Dason said as he stood up to do exactly that.

Everyone else, seeing nothing else to do, packed up the game and readied for bed.

Claire took a little longer in the bathroom than she would have liked to admit, mainly because she didn't want to find that she'd fallen asleep on Starkey before he fell asleep, then receive a talking-to in the morning.

As it was, he was snoring softly when she shambled into their shared room, and lay down in bed gingerly.

She would have liked to say that she fell asleep on her side of the bed and that she didn't touch him until later in the evening.

As it was, though, she wound up cozying up to his chest even before she passed out, and fell asleep that way.

She would have to make sure that she didn't say anything about this to her parents -to anyone- in the morning.

Or ever, for that matter.

This, at the very least, would be hers and hers alone.


End file.
